No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story.
Anniversary
If your death were human,
it would have turned adult
yesterday, and I missed
the occasion. Downwind
from your memory,
I revoke the small sentiments
that flatter and stamp
my estimation of you.
Every morning I continue my evening prayer
and then I scatter myself like a trunk cut off by the hands
of a blind and crazy slave in several pieces,
which carry in their yellow sap the smell of the earth.
Casper Piver was one of those lonely people who populate the world but go unnoticed, having no family, friends, or loved ones. He’d been placed in an orphanage at two, where he stayed until he graduated high school. When high school was over he was greatly relieved, and anxious to get out into the real world. Not that he had any great expectations, but anything would be better than the State Home. Thankfully he’d taken some vocational courses and found he had an aptitude for bookkeeping. It didn’t hurt that he was suited for it, allowing him his little niche, finding comfort in the straightforwardness of it all. He went to a placement service and was hired as a temp at a downtown industrial supply firm. Things seemed to be mutually beneficial as he was still employed there some twenty years later. He’d even shown some initiative by augmenting his skills at a local business school, auditing several basic accounting courses, which earned him a full-time promotion to head bookkeeper, and made him invaluable to his boss, Mr. Peters. Not a boastful man, he basked in this modicum of success; he was infinitely more secure and confident at work than he was in any other part of his life. Deferential but not obsequious, he got on fine with the handful of employees at the firm.
[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’][/author_image] [author_info] Kimberly Elkins’ bestselling novel WHAT IS VISIBLE (Grand Central, 2014) was a NYT Book Review Editors’ Choice, among other honors. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in the Atlantic, The New York Times, The Iowa Review, Slice and Best New American Voices, among others. She was a Finalist in Fiction for the National Magazine Award.[/author_info] [/author]
I met my great-uncle Julián for the first time at my great-aunt Teresa’s funeral. He was a dark, tiny man dressed all in white. White pants, white shirt. And a cowboy hat. He looked like the stereotypical Mexican peasant, even though I don’t think he had ever spent an hour in the country.
“It’s always the staff that gets the bargains,” said an old woman, with her arms crossed like a general on duty. “That doll is a reborn. It costs a fortune.”