Time turns into the way. I’ve to sit, for blood pressure to stabilize. Having learned doing nothing, I navigate the nurse’s understanding, later the doctor’s need for answers, saying I drank three cups of coffee before the taxi delivered my trust here. Figures still before me, soundless after the year of uncertainty. Seated, I travel, with my eyes, across vulnerable rows, ideas of hope chaired. We hold our consent’s forms, signatures affixed to the universal promise. We share the better day …
When we met, you told me I had a voice that could pinch the corners of our Carolina town wrap its skin into a hand-held bundle and inflate it -- balloon, string-tied braiding infinities around pointer and thumb. You said the only other sound that could do this came from finches when dawn was nothing more than white noise though they moved like the needlework in nests. You were gripping Helium when the ground had been peeled and repurposed acrobatic pictures through a marble …
Just before seven a.m., I hear the garbage truck. I’ve already taken the black bin to the curb. The old hockey bag spread inside the front entry for the past month didn’t fit, despite the fact I’d been dismembering it for weeks, disposing of it in serial-killer pieces. A strap, a zipper, a flap of soiled canvas. All that’s left is the plastic frame and the wheels. Braless, I pick up the bag, and sprint barefoot down the driveway. The garbage man pulls up. His truck is a side loader. He releases …
It’s been quiet in the car for a few minutes. With the windows down, I’m breathing in the newly-minted greenery that’s emerged from hiding overnight. “So there’s one thing I don’t understand,” you pipe up from your booster seat. “If there needs to be a sperm and an egg in the uterus, how does the sperm get into the uterus?” Last week, it was enough for you to know the recipe for a baby is a sperm, an egg and a place for it to grow. The leaves were buds and we’d go off-trail on our forest …
Somewhere there are photos, color slides taken in the late 1960’s of me sitting on top of a large rock. Buck teeth, hair held back from my face with a kerchief, and scrawny legs. My parents have just purchased a piece of land. It is a nice lot, seven-eighths of an acre in Truro, Massachusetts, near the tip of Cape Cod. * Every July during my childhood we’d visit this land to pick blueberries. We could pick them near the dunes, but these were our blueberries. The lot began at the top …
Back in San Francisco, I would press up behind Leon on his Harley, curving up Market Street and the Portola. When he’d told me it was over, I bawled his name into the night air. To stop making a goddamn fool of myself, I soon accepted a blind date with a Wyoming native who lived in Los Angeles. His being from Wyoming was one of my favorite things about him. He wore cowboy boots and owned a truck. Soon we were engaged. Leon tracked me down. I agreed to meet him at an Italian place in …