essays | fiction | poetry | photography | art
Our traveling was so fluid it’s like we lived nowhere in particular.
Sipping on our black coffee, my grandad and I sit together in his living room every morning. We drift between comfortable silence, where I return to my book, he returns to his paper, and short bursts of conversation. A new restaurant is opening in town, he says. I called the bank earlier, I say. What time do you start work, he asks. Yes, I will remember my umbrella, I respond.
I find a seat,
hold a headache in my hands, cradle it like a rock
between fingers, think about how this birthday
will be soup and crackers and cancelled plans.
In my earliest memories, I am eating Chinese food. My great-aunt’s house in the suburbs outside Boston is split-level and her mother, my great-grandmother, lives in the lower level. You enter through the front door onto a landing between the two halves of the house, and if you walk downstairs, her kitchen will be directly in front of you.
I remember the shape of the word rainbow
on her puckered mouth, how we sounded
it out from my bedroom window.
How did a barrel-chested man learn
this magic? Softened like golden butter
in a dizzy aftermath, he did too many wars perhaps.
We are three siblings, scattered across continents, each of us carrying the taste of a different kitchen.
Rain upon me your turbulent tales of locker-side loves,
the gossip of girls whose braces still encase their molars
I look at a photo of my Hungarian grandfather and his compatriots in Carr Bank Park, posing by the flowerbeds on Woodhouse Road, and know it is possible to belong to more than a single place.
Just as Hemlock
digs its graves in the
carrot family plot
because there’s no way he would ever find it,
being interested only in dinner/work/breakfast
/work/sex on demand/sleep/work.
the problem with mici is
they’re all so good
that they don’t even ask you
what you’re ordering
