Jun 05, 2020
Your Book Reading
“Hello, [a mispronounced version of your name], pleased to meet you.”
“Hello, [a mispronounced version of your name], pleased to meet you.”
They like flirting with local women. When they’re satisfied with the season, they catch a plane and go back to gringolandia.
The bubbly letters were both a direction and a justification for the lines of people who shelled out $37.50 for a forty-five-minute “experience” at “the sweetest place on earth.”
Why can’t we imagine, just for the sake of argument, that a joyful spirit leaves some of themselves behind—an echo of joy in a place they once loved?
What is dramatic about wanting to protect ten kids from the bullshit of the world? Just ten. That’s all I want.
Somewhere far away, someone made a call, someone in power said yes to violence, and our friends would never get to see our friends say yes to love.
The girl, a matchmaker, asked to see Shlomo’s hand. Reaching from her coat pocket, she pressed a tarot card-sized photo into his palm.
He always smelled like fabric softener exhaust from the laundromat down our block: like blue bottles of Downy and Saturday nights, when Mami would blow dry my hair straight with dollops of Dippity-Doo.
What does a melon dream about as it bathes in tendrils of rainwater, wishing to be invisible?
It was here that Dad told me the story. I didn’t know where the story had come from, or how long he’d carried it inside him.
She, too, often felt she would die if she went without physical contact. She worried sometimes that this meant she was becoming one of them.
April says the people at church don’t talk to us because they’re motherfuckers.
She updates the simple bio on her dating profile: “looking for nothing serious. I am really into knives. Really, really into knives, ask me about it.”
Maybe it wasn’t that Angie wanted to break things off with Kate; she just didn’t know enough to decide if she wanted to keep going.
This time of year, there are so many people pretending excitement when they feel none.
Who were we? Puerto Ricans stuck in a drift, still moving from an American haunting howling on The Island, howling in us.
The swastika on his sign is hand-drawn, a little uneven. Painted, not permanent marker. He made that thing himself. A Nazi crafter.
The prayer for air safety then begins to taxi to a halt: “Charge your angels, oh Lord, to escort the plane from take-off to landing.”
“You’re Mexican!” he said a little too enthusiastically, like I was just what he’d been looking for. I worried that he was going to put me in his museum or something.
I can’t stop seeing the brush in her hand as a scalpel, her countless bracelets jangling as she prepares to make the next cut.
