Colin laughs and says he hasn’t met his wife yet among the nurses at Brooke Army Medical Center. “In Kunar, when we were kicking off, and those hajjis were flaming up the road, I wished for any girl. But I’ll tell you— that was the baddest show on earth.”
I can imagine living a whole life in the house my parents almost bought in Morris Plains across from the train station; the way I almost played Red Light, Green Light in that park next to the library and almost went to school at St. Virgil’s Parish, on Speedwell Avenue; the way my father almost …
How can you help picturing it, the small huddle on your doorstep— the commander; the priest who married you; the women with their sad, drawn faces. You know the only message you will get from the pink, blistered mountains of Kabul is the one that comes when you’re thinking about the dishes or out buying …
What happens when they leave is that the houses fold up like paper dolls, the children roll up their socks and sweaters and tuck the dogs into little black suitcases. Across the street the trees are unrooting, the mailboxes rising up like dandelion stems, and eventually we too float off, the houses tucked neatly inside …
I’m far from you and tired like wine gets tired, and missing the still of your mind at work working out its thought across the room. I’m missing Summer where you are, where early morning smells like the back of your neck, missing our walking, quiet, hands held warm with the pleasure of our blood …
Do you hear wisps of sound? It might be carpenter ants in the beams or maybe we’re just not getting enough sleep, not getting enough air, judging from the yawn-triggered yawns, the nervous assemblies of words, the way we’re folding sentences into a conversation shaped like an origami duck. And while we’re chatting about how …
You said I sounded like an actor in a poorly rehearsed play, so I gave up speaking in favor of the Hindustani drone, of music waving like seaweed, wrote songs about the foothills in flower with tarweed and poppies, about the threadbare hat I filched from a neighbor and the wilted plant on my father’s …
Let’s speak to each other in the language of paper airplanes, bend our edges in to meet and fold the quiet into shapes, mold our wings according to the soft geometry of handmade things. Let’s use our time aloft to catch our breath and clear the air before we yaw, pamper back the creases in …