No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. No Kings.
Now, look, I’ve been at this for more than forty-five years — long before Satish was even an itch in his father’s pants. I started with nothing, squatting on roadsides, selling roasted chana and peanuts off a gunny sack. They called me “Joker” because of how my wide smile always stayed on, even when dust, thick as chickpea flour, covered my face and hair.
They rise to the sky in shades deeper than the night, darker than my melancholy. Fragments of midnight, they consume the space between spaces, chew them and spit them out into obsidian cityscape. I observe them from my tenth-floor apartment – the highest aerie I could afford – and fill my vista with dark uncertainty. Outlined by infinity, bathed in the light spectral, the city’s building blocks stand aloft and not a single light shines. Not one.
The starchy white pillowcase left faint red imprints on Lana’s cheek. She blinked, considered—for a beat too long—just where an insinuating shaft of sunlight was coming from. Her bedroom windows faced east, their azure-colored curtains vibrantly awash with the morning sun. This light was from the west and these curtains were taupe, tawdry. Tubes itched at their points of insertion. Not her condominium then, but St. Barnabas’s Hospital. It took longer, lately, to distinguish. To lay claim to a sense of place.
“My levees are washing away like New Orleans,” Terry tells me on the phone. “There goes a chunk now. I have sung Broadway tunes for days, but my signal hasn’t penetrated their dead zone. Did I close the windows? Pay my taxes? One is always unprepared for death.”
After Jay told Miguel and their stepfather Hank about his firefighter training—climbing three-story ladders, rushing upstairs as controlled fires raged, running sprints at the college track—Miguel made his first mistake. He rocked back in his barstool at the kitchen counter and looked at his younger brother. “Yeah, well, I’ve still got it. That squat Mexican speed thing. Waste you on the pavement.”
At the donut shop, Victor followed the manager Kurt’s instructions and asked his first customer of the day if she had an AARP card. “You get a free donut if you have one.”