...let the morning fog roll in as it had from the heaving ocean
up the block from your childhood home,
now a ghost town you are loathe to visit.
No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. Celebrating Diversity Since 2015
...let the morning fog roll in as it had from the heaving ocean
up the block from your childhood home,
now a ghost town you are loathe to visit.
Hector was standing in the middle of the street, looking up to her apartment on the fourth floor. She leaned out of the window. His Tweety Bird T-shirt hung loosely on his lanky frame. Hector was short and wiry, skittish and birdlike in high-top sneakers. Tweety looked as if the bird was yelling up to her.
The carnival existed perhaps before the great grandmother, and afterwards. For this, the carnival can be likened to the world in microcosm, because the world exists before we us and after us, ours being a finite physical journey, even though we don’t like to think of it on the sunny carnival days of happy forgetting or even on the more pensive fairground nights when we sit and watch the giant wheel lighted in the sky spin its rounds and the early autumn wind and air sings in from the invisible lake beyond.
My motto is simple. It goes, ‘It is better to be even a bad poet than a good anything else.’
Crossing from the bathroom toward the balcony, I saw my phone buzzing on the bed, an incoming call. A 702 number, Vegas area code. My forearm hairs stood at attention. Had to be Lester disguising his number. Maybe to gloat about putting one by me. To warn me—never trust someone like him, and to wish me good luck fixing the unfixable, replacing cash so Sigfried doesn’t kill me. Lester was on his way out of the country. I picked up the phone, defiantly unable to mask my voice from someone insane.