Issue 4.7

Long Unseen In the crowd, a sudden blonde halo, gold and jade— nothing like the way your eyes drifted, lost, that evening of our first encounter. Should we meet again, I fear we would already be strangers. Do not trust February's winter not to bring frost again: it beats against spotted magnolias, boughs swaying, petals falling in gusts, whole tree heavy with bruised and wilting fragrance— like the roses of your old garden after rain, like the way your eyes drifted, lost, that evening of our first encounter. We should never have stolen glances, brows speaking, our heart fixed on Los Angeles as home. But after oceans between, continents apart, lost in the lit towers of Parisian night— I am just another stranger in the crowd.

The Cold Wind I was under the overpass when the cold wind cut through three blocks away. My space was so narrow I could almost stretch my arms and touch the concrete walls at once. Something whispered to me, don’t worry, it’s just another night, another stranger passing by with eyes that don’t meet yours. And that kind of forgetting exists in a bubble. If you’re not housed, just keep your head down. But with my cardboard shelter, my meager bundle of clothes, my notepads and scraps of paper, my attempt at a solitary, inconspicuous life, this head of mine still got noticed. By the man with his radio blaring sports talk. By the woman at the soup kitchen, her coffee pot always steaming. By the storekeepers. The guys who ran the diner. Their rambunctious clientele. I was part of their gang just by standing in line. When the wind cut through, I thought, what if that’s the grocer turning me away. What if the bartender refuses a glass of water. Or that schoolteacher with the cagey smile crosses the street to avoid me. And the wind kept cutting, like it had a job to do, like it was hired by the city to remind me I was nothing. Yet there’s enough of me…just enough… for one more night, under this concrete sky.

Medusa Air Lie down with your belly to the ground. Dog scratch. Ant scurrying the uncharted territory of skin. Snake slithering through Medusa air. Grass damp through clothes. Stickiness smudging into hips. Texture pressed deeper under the body’s folding. Mouth full of stones not mine. Fists opening into useless tendrils. Heart tucked deeper. Breath slowing. A graveyard rest. Drop the stones given before you could speak. Relearn the language from ground level. Legs with sprint.

The Sins of the Innocent I watched my father slaughter birds in our window, taking it upon himself to call time on them and decree when their hour came to an end. His teeth gritted, his eyes bleary, his lips taut, he had the face of a man inside a moon, with a dirty destiny less than the ordinary, his head rolling on the axis of the planet. The muscles on his biceps bulged out. I saw clay cover his eyes like sunglasses, and his garment was the darkness of sunlight, in which he was neither clothed nor naked, but a cluster of rags thirsty for fresh water. I was wondering whether to pity him or be angry, since I believed that he didn’t know what he was doing. For an ignorant man, my father was too brave; for a deliberate man, he was too blind. Between his blindness and ignorance, I sought a course within the realms of divinity, by which his actions would be my fire, and I wound up with his shame, guilt and sin. The raven arrived from a distant tree, screamed to the shocked flowers and leaves that the sins of the father were upon the children, up to the third and fourth generations, whereby the fathers would go scot free of their crimes, while their descendants wore the mask of death. Thereupon, I turned to the sky with a loud voice, to command my morning to assert its position, and the day to swallow darkness like Jonah, and vomit it on a strange shore as mottled light, that the soul that suffers is the one to suffer, but the soul of the innocent must inherit peace. Fire rose from my father’s eyes, flames from his nose, and I saw a pillar of clouds cover his face, as though life or guilt turned him into a mosaic. I was innocent, he said, but this is my father’s burden. My father slaughtered a million guiltless ravens, and I walked through life hating every raven I met.

To My Host: A Preemptive Apology My friend, a warning: a man must have his coffee in the morning. Should I rise early and find none here, I'm certain to be surly.