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.

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.

Before the I-5, My Father Was Mexican

While attending a conference in San Diego, I am cooped up in a hotel that is coincidentally on the same street as my paternal family’s first home in America. I decide to look up the address because it will make me feel like I knew my father. 17—, I type into Google. An image of a faded yellow bungalow that sits beneath a billboard encircled by skyscrapers is the top search result. Immediately, I am reminded of the film Up. I scroll down the page, selecting a link that references historical resources. 

An attempt was made recently to designate the surviving half of this community of bungalows as historically significant. The other half had been destroyed when the state sliced through the neighborhood to make way for Interstate 5 in the 1960s.  

The report, which denies the request, reads: 

There are hundreds of similar, or better, examples of Craftsman architecture…

Additionally, [the buildings] are not associated with historically significant persons or events

The report talks about the Italian community, but my family was Mexican, even though they later changed their last names to masquerade as Europeans and escape discriminatory attitudes.  

not associated with historically significant persons or events

I consider the significance of my father, who looms large in my mind even though I refer to him in past tense when discussing him with others. My father was, my father would. Strangers must think he is dead, but really, he left my mother for a mistress and then left that mistress for another mistress and forgot he had a daughter. 

Before I looked it up, I had imagined the house flattened, recalling the ending of the film Love & Mercy, when Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys goes back to his childhood home in Hawthorne to find it no longer exists. In a way, I am disappointed Dad’s home is still standing; it would have been a cleaner ending if it were gone.  

I stare at the bungalow online and envisage myself being dropped off on the side of the busy road, knocking on the door, and announcing my entrance. My grandparents greeting me. My father not yet marred by my authoritarian grandfather. Who would he have been? I see him before the I-5, before he could remember the sound of heavy machinery severing the neighborhood, before his family claimed French heritage: when he was Mexican. 

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.