Two hours from Santiago by the Pato Piraña bus, the cookie-makers hawk their dulces on the corner. They hang their baskets on tree branches; they are tired as men who stoop over workbenches all day. In college, I stayed in a hotel over the square, the sweet smell of manjar curled like a sleeping cat …
On Sundays when I wake alone again to the dog’s snoring, a day of keeping house, the bells ringing from the church next door, I remember that we pray before different altars— his a trembling ship at sea, a few lights in the rainy darkness, and out there he is not someone’s spouse, not someone’s …
In the bathroom, fingering the wheel of tiny blue pills, you know that in a month he’ll be deployed and gone for eight more after that, but there is Dubai in August if the flights are cheap, the dripping heat and those white hotel sheets, and three months later if he comes home you might …
I wish I knew you there, a man curled up in a doll’s bed and the tailhooks pounding overhead and always people up and down the stairs and never enough hours, never enough quiet to last the night. I wish I knew you over Kandahar, the puckered smoke-black mountains and the gunfire spitting at your …
On the night of your uncle’s funeral, your mother tells you how the priest drove the wrong way to the cemetery, while both Aunt Sofia and the hearse turned right instead of left, and when they finally met at the gravesite, the priest got out of the car and started yelling at Aunt Sofia, waving …
And on certain nights on palm-treed Cayman beaches, the renters wander out at sunset among the scattered chairs, the half-buried sandwich crusts, all the clatter of the day gone, the babies glazed with sleep, and all of us waiting for the sun to move. It’s thought to sink into the water in a flash of …
If there is one thing I should say before you go, it should not be about standing on some driveway in Pensacola, baptized by airplanes. It should not be that the house was bare and there was no food, but we were young and the airplanes were like tiny glass toys in the sky, and …
a cento The pilot alone knows the chill of closed eyelids in the glaring white gap; the wired minefield; the stars in active orbit. And all is from wreck, here, there— the hot black dunes in the air. Now I am safe in the deep V of a weekday; how fibrous and incidental it all …