Dispatches

LATER
It’s the trees, the magnolia tree pearled with eyes, the neighbour’s willow weeping itself naked, the Bradford pears, fruitless, scratching at the windows. I’m learning to hate and miss a place at once, like the drive home from South Padre the day before M— killed himself. He told dad not to stop by, that he’d meet him in the morning. I thought he was childish for not coming with us that year, who can remember why anymore. The next day he was gone.

*

MOONRISE OVER BALTIC SEA
Only one mango tree left on the street named after mango trees in my mother’s homeland. I hear the women say this is the luckiest man on the island, a knife-scar running the length of the shopkeeper’s skull. When asked to describe home, I remember that safety in tornado country is a windowless and padded room and my brother’s hand securely in mine, heartbeats loud as gunshots. Every generation in our family is a woman leaving home. Here, far from the smell of mango trees and brothers it’s the same Atlantic moon that rises over Baltic seas. The sand crusts to our soles like rice neglected in the pot. My mother will be gone by Tuesday but for now she sips wine from a plastic mug and asks to stay alone a little while. She says it’s been some time since she felt safe.

*

RETURN TO CASCADIA
These three sisters hold council as if I’ve asked for guarantees: the sway of mountains, the beckoning of evergreen ghosts, the way that being born is an abandonment of womb and waking too is leaving. I have not. I have left many times knowing that the same rock will not stand in one place forever. I have said goodbye on many separate occasions. I have seen you through the window as a bird. I have seen the corners of the fitted sheet pulled over the balcony to dry, forgotten, as if pulled over a corpse. At a time like this the sparrows on the hanging planters may as well be vultures, may as well be bones mourning in the orange light of the moon. But so long have these mounds stood here, yes here, at the ready. I know a burial ground when I see one. I press my chest against the unmarked earth beneath a fern, the cedar sexton standing by and mourn them, all, one by one.

*

BONEYARD
both: grief and home in the unreachable slender seedy underbelly of the bookshelf, where sloughed skin blows and spools itself anew, my skin the only proof that i was here, entangled in a bent out paperclip-scaffolded spiderweb and cushioning the fall of bodies

*

The first fox I ever saw in Texas was by the highway, an intersection out towards McKinney after I had moved away and come back to visit. I have fallen in love for less, this little flame darting across six lanes of traffic. The moon is always full in my memory. In my memory sometimes the fox is a ghost, and sometimes it is me, and always it is a flame headed for tall, dry grass.