My Bio

I was born without breathing and placed in a small hand-painted basket, oxygen cupped over my fragile mouth. Actually, I was gingerly put in a cardboard box. I always wished it had been a basket. I remember it smelled faintly of grove oranges and coriander. Though my mother told me it was recycled from a case of champagne that was popped on New Year’s Eve, four months and one day before my May Day arrival.  

How does it feel to weigh the same as a rabbit? I remember. It was exhilarating and terrifying all at once. My legs felt small and powerful even though my bones were soft and still molding. I had a light dander that I had  hoped would morph into a full-fledged warming fur. My nose was crinkled and acute. My eyes sealed shut, thank goodness, as I was unable to see the monitors and fluorescent lights, all which would have brought me back towards the collapsing womb.  

And then there is a very long gap. I don’t recall. Or maybe I blocked it out. I found myself with a man I’d been with for more than a decade. Almost two. From rabbit to him. Yes, there are flashbacks, memories that come to me:  

I am a girl of ten and insist on wearing a paper bag over my head at home so my parents can’t see me. 

I am in college dating a man who wants to watch me eat my own hair.  

I am at my first job and my boss tells me every day my dress is see-through even after I start wearing a cement coat with galoshes and Coke-bottle glasses.

But then I am with this man for my whole life. Until now. He drives me over the Brooklyn Bridge. It wasn’t until after that he tossed me over. After we’d driven thousands of times, over years where we kept our own rabbits. A fluffle. Some angry. And jumpy. A few soft, and sweet. The rabbits were masters in role-play. One cashmere lop, with a particularly sultry mouth, wore a costume. I remember that. She was dressed as a sexy nurse.   

Tomorrow, I will meet another man. One who wears a mask of mirrors, shards melded onto his face. When I stand too close, I will see myself through his dark energy, reflected and refracted. Cracked. With light coming through.

This piece was featured in Volume 4. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Different Ways to Bathe

She’s of an age where a little something sometimes appears in her underpants. Where did that come from? When? During second period industrial arts, the seventh-grade boys knocking chairs, talking back, making everything teeter? Then, front row, sweet Silas, near tears: “I can’t stand it when they disrespect a guest.” Little Bear, the woman’s heart purrs, don’t you worry. Inside her a tub fills. To a girl in dark curls she admits: “I thought I was signing up for robotics!” (Not miter saws, sanders, drill press. . .) Curl girl nods, “Me too.” They share a snort. The woman lets Silas fetch someone from the office. When a portly fellow marches in, an orange-hair lass sasses, “Havin’ trouble keeping your pants up?” He walkie- talkies for backup. Ironic that it’s orange-hair girl who gets pulled. Noon, when she leaves the school, the woman stops at the grocery for a small avocado and continues home for a butt bath (that odd bedpan-looking thing—thirty bucks well spent!). Over lunch her mind drifts back to something huge. Giving birth. Not her. But Becky. Who bestowed the biggest honor of the woman’s life. To accompany Becky of lioness black mane while she moaned, refused meds, huffed hot mama-bear breath, and in One Blood Curdling Scream popped a head and—sploosh—a whole new being amongst us. The perpetual brimming bucket of the scene spills through the woman in a fifteen-second rush. Shoulders, chest, tear ducts. She carries her glass to the kitchen and pads to a padded rocker. Washed, dried, wept, she takes a seat near Silas, the girls, the boys in back. One baby breath, two. Another. The next.

This piece was featured in Volume 4. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Self-Portrait

I don’t want to go to the neurologist, but my family insists something is wrong because I am rhyming words and predicting the weather. I knew my daughter-in-law would have an affair before my son because I watch Spanish soap operas, not for the Spanish lessons, but the expressions. Que lastima. What a pity my son is blindfolded to his wife’s wildness. I knew my husband would die without saying goodbye because he believed we would meet in the next life, but I know there is no afterlife, no meeting place where we can meet for a drink or two. I wish I could have told him nothing was as miraculous as that first day when he smiled at me and said I looked like Pocahontas. I wore braids then to keep my hair wavy, not curly. Now I let it just be curly. I let things be. The daughter-in-law. The son. The husband who won’t like my hairstyle. But he’s dead and, as I said, we are not meeting again. I know I repeat myself. But repetition is what makes certain songs stay in our minds. We repeat lyrics. Then find the words when we need to sing. I am singing now, but my family thinks I am off kilter, given to flights of fantasy, bereft of my marbles. I didn’t know they wanted a Betty Crocker mother who couldn’t carry a tune.

This piece was featured in Volume 4. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Braids and the Meaning of Life

As a child, I was in awe of girls with braids. Girls whose hair was set in strictures like Sunday sermons. I saw how hair could be parted in one quick stroke, the sharp bite of the comb moving down the scalp. How their braids lay thick as whips along their back. Even the coarsest hair could be mastered with toothy combs and tubes of gel. But I was a strubbly child. My hair stood out, defiant, headstrong. Uncontainable. I kept trying to learn the art of braiding with my dolly, twisting and turning two clumps of hair around each other―but I could never form a braid until I watched my friend’s mother separate her hair into three equal strands I could follow as they took turns winding over and under each other. So much of life, I found, is composed of three, like the primary states of matter. Even the pole star, it seems, is really three stars in one. Not to mention the three-person God I tried to divine at school. That strange family of men. Is it some stubbornness that makes me need a third proposition to defy life’s Either/Or? A theory like a braid, whose even coils I longed to feel, twining down the center of my back.

This piece was featured in Volume 4. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Lunar Logic

There is a prequel and a sequel, then the cataclysm returns to its chrysalis, an odorless and colorless but very viscous liquid. It's been nanoseconds since my last deathbed confession. Be my albatross or alibi or flying folding chair.

There is a shoe for every scorpion, and every scorpion is in its shoe. Causation is only a partial order. At one end of every spectrum is an oxymoron; at the other, a redundancy. The continents have shifted in submission.

I thought you were serious until you said, But seriously. Just give me a place to pirouette, and I'll say it's an honor to be othered. Do you take the absentee to be an absolute? Each ethical dilemma is a trolley problem and—

today's the day the great apes have their picnic. I pronounce them separate entities. They want to know when will the bliss kick in. If I'm no angel, you're no angel. Keep your hands and feet where I can see them.

Although Sisyphus goes bowling with Narcissus, Sisyphus is no Narcissus. Quadrupeds are penitent and up in arms. This segue takes place in the nth dimension, and the tango and the bossa nova take the credit and the blame.

The butterfly was in the Bible but was only joking. That catastrophe accompanies the rapture is a given. In a bubble, I'm as probable as not. The butterfly said rest in peace but didn't mean it. Breathe on this piano, and it will go out of tune.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Number 3. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.