May 29, 2020
Low-Flying Children
The Green Man dreams that one day he will throw away the flag and depart for home in a bug-free rocket ship. But not before the children grow up, walk instead of fly.
The Green Man dreams that one day he will throw away the flag and depart for home in a bug-free rocket ship. But not before the children grow up, walk instead of fly.
Her family had no wings, only legs that could traverse blocks at street level, where no one was allowed since the Sickness.
Some just want a lick of fame, prostrate at my feet with their sweaty headshots as if I am the one to save them, as if they are worth saving.
It was That Smell, that-so-familiar-one that hurt me not to remember where I’d smelled it before.
It’s the heartbeat that I can’t forget. When the sonogram technician held her transducer to my abdomen and turned up the sound I was surprised by its rapidity.
Raul returns the greeting, always the same: by running his pointer finger over his throat in disapproval.
The whales would sing because they were alone, but with each other, their song a reminder that loss and exile are linked.
The boy loved seeing the tent from outside, lit up by firelight, glowing brightest where it was wearing thin.
You’re safe now, said the plates, the walls, the glasses, even the golden chandelier that I hadn’t noticed before.
Your near-life experiences have coalesced in this momentary identity. You are a woman speeding along I-10 with a caged green-cheeked conure chirping by her side.
They tell me that my new job is to chisel a deep and lasting crack into the foundation of American democracy.
I started to wonder how the hell she’d found me after all these years, but I was starting to realize that any chicken with the amount of determination I was seeing now would hardly be deterred from tracking me down.
You wanted us to have a baby. I wanted your baby, and also for all the moths in the house to die.
“It’s not that we don’t remember what it was like before the sound. If you asked us, we could tell you.”
