.tree.trunk.arithmetic.

eyes diverge, gaze diverts
swooping fates scratched and
carved, like tree trunk arithmetic,
onto parting palms

.the.smouldering.season.

Why is it that plants get to take in all this sunlight, turn it into food even, and the three of us are sitting here absorbing nothing more than various shades of burning, possibly even cancer? Black black cancer, that acrid charcoal. I could tell you all about it, and how we're never going to find a cure because we all know somebody with cancer, and god help us if medicine isn't the fashionably late stranger to the party. My ex called me a cynic. My father was a smoker.

"For chrissakes, Mara, you're burning up!"
Nina decided to bring her girlfriend today, and for once, I wasn't the palest one, the one peeling bits of skin off my shoulders by the end of the day. Watching Nina apply sunscreen onto Mara struck me as something less than the lesbian fantasy captured within frat house posters, and was rather a fairly eerie process. It is like when you watch actors taking off their make up backstage, wiping a ghost off their faces and shaking them back into the air of the theatre, to be resummoned and reapplied for the next audience.
Well, I suppose it was like that in reverse, watching Mara's white skin smudge whiter.

"I don't know, maybe we should all get as much sun as we can now. And then we'll have that nice burn to keep us warm when the rain hits on Thursday."
"It's going to rain on Thursday?"
"All through the weekend."
"Ah! No shit, I have to run to campus on Thursday to drop off a paper. Maybe I'll take the bus. Are you sure it's going to rain, Thomas? Where did you read that?"
"I think Ted told me at work yesterday."
"I saw it online too, Nina."
"Well goddamn, summer's really over then, isn't it?"
"It's been over for a few weeks now, hasn't it? Isn't it the twenty-first or something when it switches over?"
"I think so."
"Screw the calendar; you can't tell me that this is autumn sunlight. And who goes to the beach in the fall, right?"
"Well, I guess that would be us."
"And this isn't a beach. It's a lake. You can't have a beach unless you're on the ocean."

The last time Nina had gotten sunburned was when she went with her family to Sri Lanka. In fact, it might have been the only time she got burned in her entire life. There is a sneaking temptation to make a joke about her people being bred to be immune to the sun, but for one, I had already made that joke this morning, and for two, I had the realization that it was probably a little less than a joke. My only inheritance was scuffed up Honda, bestowed on me as encouragement to pack my belongings and move somewhere to make something of life, and have it make something of me.
I lived in that car for a month and a half trying to get there. And when I was halfway to where I was going, I made a phone call to an answering machine and doubled backed, making a beeline for the start of the story, towards the happy hand holding, the first tentative kisses that are felt out with the lips, before we could taste on each other's tongues the sustenance that keeps us alive. She must have tasted on me that black, acrid decay of a bummed Parliament Light before she flung herself across the continent, tasting, herself, ever so slightly of cheap strawberry vodka.
-I know my mom is an alcoholic, she said, and I shouldn't be saying this, but your dad died of lung cancer. Do you really want to be smoking as well?
-Fuck off. He was an alcoholic too, I said as I finished the bottle.

Nina was in the water, treading about with nebulous intentions, deliberating on whether or not she wanted to swim or stand, keep her head above or below, billow up with the passing waves or meet them stiffly like a Dutch dike.
"You don't swim, Thomas?"
"Rather, I swam too much: swim team. The problem is I don't know how to do anything else. I forgot how to really enjoy being in the water a while ago."
"How long ago were you a swimmer?"
"Oh man, I don't even know. High school? I just haven't gone back to the water since then, really."
That was a lie. I had gone to the beach, the real beach, courtesy of Estella's family after graduation, where we had had White Russians in the condo and listened to Elvis Costello. We didn't change our clothes for the entire week.
"What about you? You not a big swimmer either?"
"Hm, I guess I haven't really thought about it too much. It doesn't appeal to me, but doesn't really bother me either, I guess. I didn't bring my swimsuit today though."
Estella and I were busted by the beach cops for skinny dipping at 3 in the morning. They warned us about the riptides pulling out seasoned swimmers and the moustached one gave me a buddy-buddy nudge as we ran back to the condo. We went straight to bed naked and slept on the wet sheets for the rest of the week.
"I think they dump all sorts of trash into the lake as well. It's kind of gross."
"Yeah, I heard about that. I keep telling Nina she's going to get some horrible disease from being in that water, but she doesn't really seem to care."

I had humoured my parents before my dad died, by going with them to the Phillipines for their 25th anniversary. It was the dead of winter and all I had on me were the books and printed out essays I needed for my research paper. My mom had a somewhat disappointed look about her, but must have decided to not let it stop her as she spent the rest of the week drinking rum in the giant sandcastle she commissioned some 8 year-olds to build her, and eating at the various Mongolian barbeques by night. My dad gave me some cash, which I spent at the poorly-ventilated internet cafe writing disjointed emails half a day into the past.
I finally gave in to my mom's insistence that I try the terrific fresh seafood halfway through the trip, being utterly fed up trying to explain vegetarianism to the vendors, who had learned only enough English to pander to the tourists on the island that outnumbered them a dozen to one. As expected, I got not quite deathly ill, but I could make out death on the horizon, it seemed.

Nina was drying off her hair and changing out of her swimsuit, attracting more than a few glances from a Hispanic family down the shore, as well as an elderly Asian family feeding some seagulls.
"Have you ever realized that this beach is usually totally the ethnic beach?"
"It's not a beach, Nina."
"Whatever, babe."
Watching them kiss made me wonder if Estella and I had ever been that sincere. I don't know it was just us or not, but I don't think I was ever as natural at it as Nina and Mara were. It's like they had it all figured out, and knew how to make it count, or if not, were willing to overlook the dark alleys of their doubts, and walk under the bright streetlights of the time they had together.
"So who moved in with who?"
"Ha ha. We still have our own places, thanks."
"While Nina's finishing up school anyway, right?"
"Oh, way to give the game away. So yeah, yeah, we'll be the U-Haul lesbians, but I'm allergic to cats, so don't count on that."
"And I like dogs better anyway."
"No dogs either! It's too close to having children."

-You're burning up, Thomas, my mom said as she put a damp hand towel over my forehead. God knows where she found a thermometer in the Phillipines. Her hands felt soft and cool against my skin, despite the callouses from playing the cello.

Mara's recital was in a few weeks, and it was her big fall performance, the last proving ground before her college would relinquish to her her due degree. Nina had nearly gotten fired from her part-time job trying to get that evening off.
-Aw, damn the man. You know I'd go even if they fired me.
None of us knew if Mara was going to get her visa renewed after graduating. Nina joked about her screwing up on purpose, but I suppose that it is some seriously bad juju to talk about that kind of thing. And in all honesty, Mara was good, too good to force herself to underperform. The first time she had played for us in her living room, it was if each wavering note had trickled down our ear canals and set fire to the kindling in our chests.

Summer was burning itself out, us smouldering along with it, leaving blackened husks to wait for its inevitable return the coming year, complete with new ultimatums of reigniting myself or finally collapsing inwards into the tarry darkness of my heaving lungs.

.where.do.you.find.a.dolphin.frame.

"Mr. K and Ms. S cordially invite you to attend their wedding on the 16th of May"

The invitation was pretty, I suppose, if not decorated overzealously with dolphins, which S loved so much when we were together. It looks like some things never really change. She certainly sat in his lap as they stared at the computer monitor, sifting and sieving through images of dolphins, deciding whether or not they should go with a gracefully submerged s-shaped posture, or the exuberance and raw energy of a bottlenose exploding from the water. Jesus, did they actually consider getting those cheesy entangled dolphin rings as well? or matching yin and yang dolphin tattoos? She'd never be that tacky, of course.
Don't get me wrong, here. I don't have the kind of emotional stake in this whole thing in the way you might imagine. I'm over it. Seriously. I'm seeing someone too, and she comes over every Tuesday and Thursday and spends the night, usually. I try to make it over to her place on Fridays when I can, but in all honesty, she tends to go out more than I do, and after spending a few nights alone in her bed, it seemed a little easier to make plans on my own.
Actually, most of these plans end up being lonely nights in, trying my best to churn something out of the piano. She plays the cello. Not S, that is, but Kaela, my current partner. We actually met at a city-sponsored free opera event, where we were shushed by the teeming ocean of white people indulging in high white culture. We laughed about how we were setting a bad example for our respective stereotypes. It didn't matter what they were, of course, so long as we were browner than the rest of them. She told me to fart behind a particularly stuffy collar as we ditched the concert mid-aria to go throw pebbles at the small sailboats in the harbour. We fooled around on a park bench before she straightened her jacket, looked for the earring that she had just lost, before finally deciding that she didn't have time before her cello lessons.
Last I heard from S, she had made it back to school like she had wanted. She was working on her masters now, if I recall correctly, in child sociology, in particular something to do with the legal system as it applies to minors. And the funny part is that we had always talked about how we hated children, or at least the prospect of creating any. I wonder if K is bringing any children into the relationship. Common sense says no, but I never thought S would go back to school either. I never thought she would give up eating meat again, and I figured it must be K's fault. It always seems to go one direction or another with those kind of dietary relationships. I must have corrupted her for that year and a half, when she reintroduced into her body the disassembled flesh of once living animals. She vomited the first time she ate the sushi we had picked up on a whim. I was caught off guard, and when I realized what had happened, I told her that we could have at least made an event of it, rather than mediocre take-out sushi in front of Star Trek reruns on my living couch. I thought I could handle it, she said, I didn't want to be the girl that orders the salad all the time.
I put the wedding invitation in the top drawer of my filing cabinet. It's where that sort of thing goes these days: invitations, birthday cards, ironic July valentines from Kaela. Below it, I keep folders of various photographs people send me. I think that my diploma might be tucked away in that drawer as well. And finally, the bottom drawer is where all the letters go. I have lost some of the envelopes, and a few of the letters met sloppy fates with saucy meals, but everything, for the most part, is still fully intact.
Frankly, I never even read anything, and hardly even look at the photographs, although I had always promised S I would find a good one to frame. Kaela doesn't seem to really mind, and suggested that I should get the photo inside an elaborate dolphin frame. Do they even make those?
The more I think about it, the more S fills up most of that cabinet, and some days, I really just want to lose the key and throw the whole thing into the ocean, walking away without ever seeing whether or not it sinks sleepily into the murky depths or surfaces for air.

I'm sick of hearing about the goddamn wind. I want to sink my teeth in a poem already.

.echoes.on.the.line.

It occurs to me that I can't recall how you sound, the voice that crept over me for so long. And we have all these great analogies and images for how it's like watching a silent movie, or hitting the mute button on the remote, but it's a little more eerie than that, I think. It seems that - with the absence of subtitles in my memories - the words are preserved, but given breath by other voices. So I suppose we can modify that metaphor a bit. We can call it a dubbed film.
Is it a big deal? Probably not. I tend to shy away from the phone anyway, and at this point, both of us having taken flight to opposite ends of the continent, drawing open like curtains the vast expanse of land in between us, there is little chance of actual contact. We would have nothing to say to each other.
It's bad enough for me having to call customers while I am at work, and I spend most of the time hoping that they won't pick up, allowing me to leave a message wherein I will trip over the same inevitable consonant clusters. And for all the typos I ignore in text messaging, as I spread grease all around the tiny illuminated keys on my phone, no one is expecting more than a few words. No one is really expecting my voice.
So maybe you don't remember what I sound like either. We could have an anonymous phone conversation from two pay phones, and talk about all the things that have been going on, and we can imagine the voices and stories coming from the mouths of strangers. If we could free ourselves from memories.

My phone rings, and I scramble as I always do to pick it up.
She's calling me back!
I answer the phone, my tongue ready to walk a tightrope of the right steps and sounds. For a moment I can almost recall your voice as she says my name, but as she continues speaking, the memory recedes back to being nothing more than an unplaceable humming along to this new refrain.

Fever

Your skin is a fever under
my fingers. At night when
thunder beats like a drum
against the house, we shield
our bodies in blankets.
I feel like a new moon
rising over you, far away
but seemingly near.
Let me love you from here
where it's safe, where
it's easy to lose.

Illinois

Come over; eat cereal with me.
I want to be poor
with you.

But then I don't. I don't
want what my parents had,
their food stamps and their love.

This morning
two slugs drug across my porch,
one half on the back of the other.

I sizzled them with salt, what else
was there to do?
It is a fool's thing to die alone.

.history's.hooves.

"
It's the old Gestapo headquarters. They're digging it up, researching the past. I don't know how anyone of my generation could accept that --Gestapo crimes neutralized by archaeology.
"
-Ian McEwan, Black Dogs


We are the walking, breathing past, not come to life as in the movies, but refusing to submit to rest. But not all of us. Don't flatter yourself; you may be as old as I, and although the stampede of history tramples us all, rarely do the wildebeest deeds of our lives make eye contact. Rarely do we come close enough to feel the breath from hot history's nostrils.

My two-year old nephew comes to visit me today. I told my brother that I would watch him while him and his wife went on a date. They are going to the same restaurant they were in eleven years ago when he proposed to her. I remember him asking me about it, if I thought it was wise, if I thought she'd accept, and what could I say? Would they have enough money? How did our parents do it? I had half a mind to follow him to the restaurant that night and watch from the corner as he sweated in his new collar, making small signals to the waiter.
And after they got married, our parents kept asking when the grandkids were coming, as if they could think of no better way to elbow their way into our lives any further. My brother and his new wife said they weren't ready yet; they were both still in school, and wanted to have enough money before bring a kid into the world. I wondered if there were some stupid book of these conversations that normal people memorized, quoting and playing the part with lack of gusto when the scene was set. 'And what of your brother', they asked him. 'Tell him to stop screwing around. He's the oldest son and he still doesn't have a girlfriend, much less a son to carry the name.' Where do they get this stuff? My brother sticks up for me as best he can, but it's a losing battle.
By the time that Jonas, my nephew, was born, my parents were in the ground and sea. My mother wanted to be buried, returned to the earth and all of that business. My father wanted to be scattered into the waters of the Pacific Ocean, presumably to make the swim back to his homeland. Even to their deaths, my parents were of firm, if not stereotypical character. How is it that my mother wished to be reunited with that great natural mother of all of us, while my dad thought he could still conquer the vast expanse of azure wilderness? I'm telling you, if there is some guidebook to staying in character, I did not receive one.
My brother tells me maybe I can start Jonas on the guitar early, haha, and maybe he'll be great musician one day. Like I never was, my brother is mindful not to add. And technically the guitar is partially his, as he lent me money to buy the 54-year old guitar, money which I have yet to pay back, though he has long since forgotten about it. I have not touched it in at least a month, to be honest, but probably closer to six weeks. The strings, no doubt need to be changed. And what the heck, why was I even considering all of this as if Jonas was actually going to sit down and play the damned thing, which sits, older than both of us combined, in its humidity-regulated case more often than not.
Jonas is dropped off shortly after Angie gets off work, as my brother swings by on his way to picking her up. I eye his slick black car, barely a year and a half old, and wonder how long it will be before they decide they need an SUV, or a minivan. Or maybe they'll have enough money to keep the date car, loaning me the minivan when I need to run errands.

"Thanks for watching Jonas, bro."
"No problem," I say, thinking of whether or not he was welcome.
"We'll probably be back before midnight, after the concert."
"Oh, a concert, too? Who's playing?"
"Oh, I don't know. Nobody you'd like. Angie got the tickets. It might be an orchestra?"

He sped off down the street, and I could picture him straightening his shirt, and delicately playing with the spot on his nose where he had a mole surgically removed when he was 24. It messed up his mojo, he said. You still got it, old man? he joked with me. I told him I hadn't had a date in six months. He laughed and told me maybe he'd try to set me up with someone he knew, maybe someone in his program. I don't need a green card girlfriend, I told him. He laughed again and drove to the hospital.
I never had the nerve, or desire, to renovate my face, but I held no qualms when it came to my house, an old duplex my parents had bought so I could have a convenient home while I was in school. They had rented out the other side, but since they died, it sat vacant while my brother and I circled around the idea of trying to rent it or sell it. You could move in with me and Angie, he said. I told him I could probably fix it up a little and then we could play it by ear. Sure, let me know if you need help.
So it began over three years ago, and I am still in the process of knocking down walls, replacing flooring, repainting. I stayed at my brother's for a week while I was working on the plumbing, but Jonas had just been born and I suspected I wasn't truly welcome. But he had promised, and with the prospect of the duplex being sold, if not collapsing beforehand, he was probably figuring out what he'd do if I actually moved in with him. After all, we were both raised with the unbreakable tenet of family first, and it'd be sooner than later that Mom would rise from the dirt and Dad's ashes would stop midstroke and turn right back around if we were to violate laws of family. 'Do you know how much we went through and sacrificed to give you everything? You wouldn't even be here if your father had gone to school for playing guitar.'
I think, really, I just enjoyed seeing change. I liked seeing the rooms change size, location, the walls change colours, the doors tentatively experimenting with which way to swing. We were told that if there were to be another earthquake, like the one that brought my parents' house down over their heads, we were to try to hide in the bathtub or underneath a door threshold. And why not a bathtub under a threshold, I joked. The lawyer tried to muster a chuckle before getting a papercut on his ring finger from some document or another my parents had prepared in case of their incidental demise. They were ready for everything, I suppose.
Anyway, that was the uninhabited side of the duplex, of course, and despite my satisfaction at the constant and complex rearrangements of structural skeletons, it was a relief to sit down on my couch and be entertained by Jonas. Jonas despised television, which I imagined was something of a vestigial trait from our parents, who bought a TV as a status symbol and consequently banned my brother and I from watching it for more than an hour a day, maybe two on weekends. The first time Angie had tried the electronic babysitter, Jonas burst into tears at the garishly coloured puppets on the big-screen TV, expanded to unnatural sizes. It could have been worse, but Jonas was rather well-behaved, a Golden Child all of Angie's friends joked, before relaying the last post-natal catastrophe. Jonas seemed pretty content to sit around and practice walking and running around most of the time, so long as someone was there to pay attention to him.
Eventually I decided to relocate to the porch, so we could watch as the setting sun painted the sky like an Easter egg. And with the outline of the buildings etched into the horizon, I thought about my little neighbourhood, this small town actually being inside a giant Easter egg, waiting to be found by someone, to be held by new hands, and examined by new eyes.
The librarian girl that lives down the street is walking her dog and stops to coo at how cute Jonas is. She knows he isn't mine and doesn't bother asking. I tell her that her dog is also cute, to which she laughs and says, 'Oh, this old fart? He is far beyond his cute years.' We talk a little longer about the weather and Kurt Vonnegut, before she starts to continue with her walk. 'Before old Woland here decides to crap on your yard,' she smirks as she tosses his ears around. 'Woland?' I ask. 'Oh yeah, I got him long ago right after I read The Master and Margarita and just thought it'd make the perfect name.' 'Ahh. I think I may have just gone with Margarita, personally.'
I would have asked her if she had liked to make some margaritas had I not tried asking her out to a movie when she moved into the neighbourhood. She agreed, but had decided to bring a friend of hers along as well. We had a good time hanging out, and I couldn't help feeling like that Steve Buscemi played in the movie adaptation of Ghost World. They would no doubt talk about how I was an old creeper after we parted ways that night. She would then think of various ways to tell me I was too old for her. She never did.

'Maybe you'll have better luck than me, Jonas.'
He wasn't particularly paying attention to anyone right now, and was playing with plastic ring etched with bite marks. I thought about how terrible plastic was for the environment, and how it would outlast both of us, and this house that we were sitting on the porch of. And yet, it would never receive the baton of history from Jonas, or his potential children, or their potential children. It will remain well-trampled, and utterly ignored by history stampeding by. Looking at Jonas, and the librarian girl disappearing down the block, I felt truly like walking, breathing history, and how we all have our turns to catch the eye of time's wildebeest, before being relegated to nothing more than ink to be written into the memoirs of those following us in the kicked up dust.

.eskimo.rolls.

With compulsory athletics, you don't end up having too many options until senior year. Until then, it was boys beating on boys in intramural house football - the oldest full-contact football league in the United States, I read - and then lurching into the drudgeries of winter and spring sports at which only the occasional sub-talented, or too lazy to try out for varsity, boy would attempt to lead his team. That was me with volleyball in the first month or so of winter term, and soccer at the start of spring term. Perhaps the best memory I have of how house volleyball played out is not even my own, but rather that of the duty master who coached our volleyball antics towards, and hopefully over, the net. It was some point during one of the games, when a boy on the other team happened to be standing on the court with his hand - and this is a bizarre trend I have not seen, thankfully, since my high school days - crassly down the front of his athletic shorts. He was neither fondling himself, nor was it cold, and the duty master (who we were all convinced had been a spy, and had a Chinese wife who barely spoke English) looked on with disgust, remarking dolefully that it was his personal volleyball that we were playing with. And does that cretin even realize where his hands have been and where they currently are?
It goes without saying that sophomore and junior year were a nightmare of competitive apathy.

So by the time senior year rolled around, the leashes were let out a bit, just taut enough to remind us of who was in charge, but just slack enough to earn our gratitude for the slender mercy afforded us: an extra hour of parietals (though I never really had girls in my room anyhow), an hour chipped away from study hall, and allowing the senior Upper House to become something of a quarantine colony for those with quick onset senioritis. And clearly, there is enough mayhem and debauchery in those extra hours to fill out page upon page, chapter upon chapter of epic stories. But my school, which I will perhaps keep unnamed for a while longer, has more than its fair share of lore in that manner, the kind of unspoken lore that garners a sly hint of a grin from the housemasters' mouths if they deem you worthy of such exclusivity. For the record, I never quite bought into the whole system of house competition (and as seniors, who were we fighting anyway?), and consequently suffered something of a rebuke from the housemasters. You have to figure that anyone living with their family in a house stuffed with over a score of teenage boys has to be looking for something they didn't get enough when they were stuffed into the plaster-walled rooms. They are curators of vicarious past ribaldries. They are the fathers that try to incompetently play Nintendo with you, and then refuse to drive you to your friend's house. Old boys and older rules lorded over the brick buildings of those dorms.

But in any case, with no one else to compete against - the senior boys were all packed into one enormous dorm - the non-varsity or JV sports for us were a hodgepodge of whatever activities the teachers that abhorred athletics wanted to do. Well, of course. You know that not all among those intellectual bunch had forgotten the days when they were humiliated by poor endurance and an anemic sense of coordination. So as it were, one of the physics teachers and another teacher I can't remember taught and sponsored - babysat, really - senior kayaking, the refuge of those of us looking to escape not only gruelling physical exertion, but also the confines of the 800-acre campus designed by the infamous Olmstead. There's never enough space when a wall is around it.
The first task was to teach us not to drown. We were taken to the swimming pool, where we then provided with kayaks, lifejackets and paddles, maybe even helmets. As we were instructed on how the skirt worked, and where the handles were, and how to bail out of the capsized kayak, I came to the realization that I was going to have to get wet, something I had reached a plateau of loathing for after having been forced on the swim team for 7 or 8 years of my early life. And whereas I appreciate the broader shoulders now, which I have received compliments directed specifically at (leaving me speechless, as how do you even respond to such a remark), there has ever since been a sour taste in my mouth for those chlorinated rectangular bodies of water. Eventually, we were all taught how to eskimo roll as well, which I think was taught to us more so to boost our self-confidence than anything else, as I don't think any of us were ever able to successfully execute the maneuvre in open water.
But finally, they thought we were ready to pile into the van and make our way towards the Delaware River, the very same one that George Washington brazenly crossed in a painting somewhere. The noble posture was a little compromised when I realized that the water was no more than chest deep in most parts I paddled about in.
At first, we didn't do anything fancy; we just took a leisurely kayak canoe trip down some side stream, where, to counteract some of the boredom of teenagers being surrounded by nature, my classmates began to compose a theme song for my roommate, who had somehow acquired the moniker of Robot Astronaut. I think that may actually have been my doing. It was partly because at some point in time in the van, we had been discussing a bass guitar, which Will heard as a "space guitar". It was also partly because we all enjoyed harrassing Will over his large head - though it could have just as well been a slender neck.
Eventually, the instructors decided we should tackle one of the waterfalls on the river. I think everyone was a little excited and anxious over the proposal, envisioning grandiose waterfalls from fiction and photos alike. Not to mention that one scene in The Last of the Mohicans starring Daniel Day-Lewis where he makes out with some girl behind an Indian waterfall before diving down the toppling water (I think that that particular film was watched a disproportionate amount in high school, and still sticks to the inside of my head to this day).
Of course, when we arrived at the waterfall, it was a gurgle of rushing water with the ferocity and grandeur of rainwater swirling down a sewer grate. Our physics teacher was clearly more excited than he had been in weeks, and was eager to get us all to 'surf' the little waterfall. We willingfully complied, paddling a few times in the rushing water before turning around and floating downstream a bit until we could make it back to the wooded bank of the river.

And one day, as the fall days got inevitably cooler, and the river correspondingly dropped a few degrees, we found ourselves more than a little disgruntled at the prospect of getting wet on such an overcast day, the kind that has the odor of unprepared for midterms and college essays. It was another day tackling the great waterfall and we could practically see the field lines and vectors of excitement radiating from our physics teacher's face.
We all took our time trudging down to the ater, dragging our kayaks on our shoulders (I swear they got heavier as the season wore on). By this time in the year, we had resorted to wearing the waterproof nylon jackets provided to us, possibly the most uncomfortable thing I had to wear all senior year. The wet nylon was one thing, but the elastic fitted cuffs and waistline made the whole thing near unbearable for me, and I even decided for a day to forego the thing altogether and just deal with the cold.
But if anything was a sign that none of our hearts were really in it that day, we were ignored. The results were almost comical, really: as we each took our turn, one by one, to try to surf the falls, we each, one by one, capsized immediately. Every last eight of us in less than ten minutes, swept downstream by the current, and unable to do an eskimo roll taught to us over a month ago in the placid serenity of the swimming pool. We all abandoned ship, which had been the modus operandi anyhow, as none of us were really capable of anything except saving ourselves. Except this time, I wasn't able to grab my kayak and paddle after I emerged from underneath the water. I began to focus, instead, on my swimming training as a child and started taking some decisive strokes toward the river bank. If anyone was watching, they might even be impressed enough to ask me where I learned how to swim like that. As it were, I took approxiamately three strokes before I realized I could stand up in the water, which came up somewhere along my thighs.
When I made it back to the bank, with all my other wet and shivering friends, I told the teacher that my school-provided kayak and paddle were floating downstream along the Delaware River somewhere. I could see my physics teacher's expression collapsing, like Rome in flames, becoming nothing more than a defeated resignation of an old white-bearded man by the time we all piled back in the van.
But for the moment, as the two teachers chased my kayak and paddle down the water, we were left on the bank of the Delaware River, shaking our wet hair out, with at least two hours before dinner at the dining hall and miles from campus. For the next 15 minutes or so, we were all free, free to be swept away by the fiery leaf-bearing currents of brisk autumn air before we too were hunted down by grizzled old physics teachers.

.things.i.have.been.putting.in.my.body.

Everything I eat looks the same.

Love Poem No. 1

I was here when I loved you
and so
I am here just the same.

.knocking.bones.

you never liked
me knocking my bones
the dull impact as
something in my skin
came into contact
with the outside world

millions of microfractures
it is said, over time
will regrow into stronger bones.
but one major fracture will floor you

i bounce my elbows together
i flick a pen back and forth against my shin
i tap my fingers on my ribs, my skull
as if i were punching into a typewriter, out of paper
or fingering frets on a stringless guitar
there is no soft hand coming between myself
staying my knees and wrists
no voice saying,
"Stop it, that really creeps me out."

.a.legacy.apart.

It didn't occur to me until rather recently that some of my friends from childhood, while I lived in Saudi Arabia, were around for the Apartheid. I could wrap my head around some of my peers being around for the Berlin Wall coming down, albeit I don't actually feel that I know too many Germans. I did think about the head German baker at my former job having grown up with that institution in place, but maybe I never gave it too much thought.
But that's just it, really: political trauma seemed to be symptomatic of older generations. And it's not even as if I really believe the world has become a better place to inhabit. With each problem solved, new ones seem to spring forth, like heads of the Hydra.
But anyway, even thinking of talking to Lithuanian and Latvian friends about their experiences of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc collapsing was bizarre, but it just didn't really hit me the same way as realizing that I had white South African friends that grew up with Apartheid as standard practice. What are we teaching ourselves?

This isn't meant to be a rant, or a PSA. Rather, it's an attempt for me to discern shapes through the translucent glass panes of their country's history, distilled through nothing more than some books and texts I've read. And there is no fiction that I can create in the face of what should never have been squeezed off of the paper into non-fiction in the first place. As much as we want that photo of black and white children holding hands, sharing toys through a chain link fence, I think they exchange nothing but skeptical gazes and taut silence.

.southern.wedding.

Have you ever noticed (I am sure you have) how freshly cut hair never falls in quite the way you wanted it to when you started. Perhaps it's more noticeable if you cut your own hair like I do, and you have no one to blame but yourself and your twitchy fingers on the reins of the hungry blades. I suspect this is why it's so easy to keep snipsnapping away until you have nothing left to obscure your prominent widow's peak.

It was just a little trim for this wedding I'm going to this weekend in the dirty heart of Texas, which isn't so dirty, and is actually rather young and hip and Bohemian, not unlike you. It is if Texas is an oyster on the seabed of the country, and in all the obesity and terrible air quality (oh yeah, and rampant racism and backwoods conservative cowboy ethos), some pearl was solidified, fortified and called Austin. The safest place for our kind is dead centre, surrounded by vast expanses of hostile white neo-natives. In fact, it's not unlike Columbus in that regard, I suppose.

My friend getting married, Sahar, constantly had a problem when we were younger: everyone seemed to want to spell her Persian name "Sarah", and you'd think that in the international community and school that we were in, a place where there were more Omers and Osmans than James or Johns, there would be some sensitivity to that sort of false typo. It even reminds me of taking a class with one of my favourite English professors at OSU, Pranav Jani: it wasn't his name that was mispelled, but the course was on Salman Rushdie, which the university printers had graciously corrected on the syllabus to read "Salmon Rushdie". We were headlong into postcolonial discourse (the Western biases of technology and its spell checks) before we had even cracked open Midnight's Children.

My friend Gianna will be there too, and is probably the main reason I agreed to go to this wedding at all. It's not as if neither of us are friends with Sahar; I think we just needed each other's presence to motivate ourselves to go.
And so, for the first time in probably a decade, our three families will all be in the same place at the same time. It feels as if it is some elaborate astrological event, but if it is scattering any tea leaves in my direction, I have done nothing more than ingest them to settle my recently poisoned stomach.

I imagine it like some ghost image of the past, blurred into the present picture. There we all are, standing in line: the Phams - 3 boys, the Bishehs - 4 girls, the Leggios - 3 girls. We hardly fit into the pictures of ourselves, and what is this business now of Sahar getting married? Is this for real?
The ghost image decays a bit, eroding slightly around the edges, not in quality necessarily, but in a more ontological sense, if that is the word. Objects begin to disappear from the field of vision, until all that's left is each of our faces, and how we have even outgrown those.

Am I ready for this confrontation? On one hand, yes. I have my clothes picked out, an outfit that was remarked upon as being "very GQ". Gianna told me that her mom is putting money on me as being best dressed at the wedding.
And on the other hand?...
Who's to say. My family stresses me out. Being in Texas stresses me out. Confronting layers of my past seems to have interesting effects on my head, a palimpsest of escapism and striving to just be enough.

Families reunited. Families expanded. Children gone. Fathers gone. It's not the same picture at all. One wonders how one was ever deceived in the first place.

July II

A flower pressed between the pages
of a book I haven't read: your way
of saying I was something else.
I call for you all night and get the same
machine. As if our bodies in infinite collision
were not enough. As if
your shoulder in the bare moonlight
could make any of it easier.
I find my way down
the block where our neighbor's
crab apple tree spits fruit
all over the sidewalk.
Then the rain in summer, how
warm, uncomfortably warm
like you in bed beside me, sweating
out your dreams.

Diner

The woman in the Chinese diner sits
two tables diagonally from me.
She is aware of herself the way
lonely people are.
I could be her in thirty years,
eating lunch by myself in
an over-sized sunflower shirt
and red pants. I want never to be
old. Each bite of lo mein
closer to my last.

.just.to.show.you.can.

I remember when I was probably about seven years old, I was thrust into all the activities a son could let down his father in. Try your best. Swimming, soccer, little league. There were probably more things, more sports. A healthy body, a healthy mind. Right? Explain jocks. Rotten minds in ripe bodies, moldy flesh in firm fruit. But not me; school comes first. Absolutely. Keep your grades up. Why only a B+? I'm talking to the teacher for you. Oh, that's so embarrassing, a mother shmoozing up some better grades for you. It's 'cause the school's so small. You can't help but know everyone. You can't help but be in everyone else's business, if only because they speak the same language. And you'd poke fun at their accents as well. You'd run around taunting the lunch lady until she cried. We sure as hell did. Maybe that's why they kept us busy with these sports. And maybe it was some semblance of familiar motions, comfortable movements, choreographed as if we were all at home across the water, where none of us would have known each other. So we'll just pretend, for the sake of it, for the sake of the charade. Were we playing sports? playing parts? And although swim team was the worst, I couldn't quit it for the life of me. I certainly tried, but it was like trying to reverse a dive back onto the starting block, a bootstrapping feat wherein it proved rather impossible to fully extricate myself from the agony. I wanted none of it. Do I totally regret it? Perhaps not. I have broad shoulders, and I suspect I have years of swim team to thank for that. I have recently found I have the shoulders of a medium sized woman, but not the hips. If you squeeze the forms a bit, we'd all resemble each other in a bit. Mold your body into the furnishings for the mind. But I also remember the guitar lessons. I couldn't have been more than, what did I say earlier? seven years old. Signed up for guitar lessons after school. Same building even. Same teachers too, I suspect. Did I know what a guitar was? Only in theory. And I had a realization a day into it: I could quit. So I quit. To what end I have no clue anymore. In fact, I think of all the good it could have done me. And yet I quit, for no other reason, I suspect, than to simply show myself that I could, that I could simply walk out that door and never have to look back. And there is certainly a story in that somewhere, should you look hard enough. A moral? None. Only lessons, once learned, forever clawing at that door to be released. Let me out! I quit! And never look back. Not until you're far enough to safely reminisce nostalgically about your regrets, insulated like a down jacket by the deadened silent feathers of all the years you put between yourself and whatever it is you thought you had quit.

July

July, like the hot breath of the dog
lazing on the porch.
I'd hole up in my room for days.
I could smell you all over
your side of the bed, right against
the wall. Even when you're gone,
you're there.

.house.and.homeless.

In this poem, he compares the heart to a house. It is a nexus of coming and going, eaten-away foundations, and wooden supports ready to ignite.

Whatever. You have to think that any grizzled old man writing poetry in his cabin knows rather little about love. And on that note, why is everyone so persistent on the topic? Universal themes are boring, aren't they? Or maybe it's just that they're safe.

The house is a haven. I do not need to reiterate the adage that a man's home is his castle.

And yet, she just did. Do women poets compare their organs to architectural structures as well? Why do all these men feel the need to construct their emotions outside of themselves? Erect themselves in nature somewhere and disappear again back into the woods and, eventually, the dirt. Why make symbols? At what point does representational analogy re-establish itself as paradigm, reasserting itself forever like a defiant statue in the desert?

And besides the direct metaphor, we must think about what is being implied given social context. Men have traditionally built houses; women have made homes. If the heart is a house, then the speaker is perhaps relating to us that he has an unfulfilled space. He requires his mistress to perform the transformational act of house to home.

House and homes have always been dicey for me. I lived overseas for most of my life, with the implicit knowledge that my house was temporary, as if it were written into the walls, "You are here, and you will leave". And the stark reminders every summer when my family returned to my country of birth, of citizenship, chiselled away at my American identity. I didn't really live here. Who was I fooling? My parents came uprooted from across an ocean and stretched their branchy arms into the air and grew money on their fingertips, shaking it down every fall to pay my tuition. And do I live here either? In this dorm? This is no more a home than a hostel, with possessions bolted down, and memories sewn up in mattresses.

What does the reader have to make, however, of the secret chambers of the heart that occur in the third stanza? What do locked rooms in a house denote? On which side of the door must we assume the speaker's love interest is locked? Is she his mistress? or does he have mistresses? If we extend his referral to her as his lifeblood in the first stanza, then we have to contend with two things: the first is that blood occupies the whole heart, and if there are sealed off chambers of the heart, we must assume that they contain blood all the same. And the second, is that the movement of blood through the heart, as the speaker admits, can only flow in one direction. From what rooms is the speaker's love moving, and where to? Is she destined to be expelled altogether?

Living in Saudi Arabia, the law accommodated for up to four wives, a fact that is often recited in Western demonizations of the Muslim and Arab world. In reality, it was rarely fulfilled. Four wives are four wives, and not just four more mouths to feed, but four more voices to hear. And given a few generations, that number grows exponentially. Did these women and their children have their own rooms, as the multiple wives their huts in Achebe's Things Fall Apart? or did they mingle together? Half-brothers, and half-sisters struggling to remember names and social standings. In the Bible, it was the custom for the first son to inherit everything, but it never once happened, at least in the Old Testament. Look for yourself. A rabbi told me.

The heart is the nexus of emotion and passion, as you clearly know, class. But, given the popular modular perspective of human character, where then does the mind reside, if not the house and home? And does the soul encompass the two? or does it too have its own dwelling place? Are these three components defensibly separatable? Can they act independently? And if the answer is yes, do we have to contend with the Self as an amalgamation of discrete identities? And if the answer is yes again, then is the poem setting up a parallel with the Christian model of the Holy Trinity? If we have that parallel to consider, then we, the readers, are in a place where we must decide which parts of the Trinity align with which parts of the Self as presented in the poem. If we accept the Father as the mind, the Holy Ghost as the soul, and the Son as the heart, then we are now left with a situation in which the Son, or the speaker, is the house, which the Father does not reside in, but has created. The question this leaves us with, and the topic of your coming essay, is whether or not the speaker has knowingly created an impossible love scenario for himself, wherein he must abandon reason and rationale - his Mind - in order to inhabit the fragile and empty structure of his house with his mistress. We will discuss the ensuing parallels with Father-Son/family connotations and how the Holy Ghost/soul plays into the dichotomy next class. Don't forget to pick up last week's paper before you leave.

Impossible scenarios indeed, this long distance relationship. And I know that it is only temporary while you are studying in Central America. Or was it working with Habitat for Humanity? Houses, homes, habitats. We live in all of them, but so rarely do I ever feel as if the walls will hold me in. What are we sheltering ourselves from? What elemental forces are so violent that we must shield ourselves inside of ourselves? You were like a tropical monsoon, ripping through all the little buildings inside of me, growing like palm trees. And now we have reached the dry season. Can we make it another year? Are we ever going to feel that cyclonic ferocity again, shaking the beating walls? It tires me, replanting, rebuilding, repairing every season. There is no such thing as progress, only cycles; no linearity, only meandering garden paths. And at the end of the day, when the sun sinks in my head, the heart is still the house to which we return, and I am homeless.

.refridgerator.

like my mother, you
have come and
gone
in your wake an
overstocked fridge
an open front door
inviting the night
air cooled by rain
it refuses to enter