Post #4

Photo by William Eggleston

Untitled
Kimberly Wang

Too soon to shed our winter coat, the wind against your pretty skin, the sky pressing in bruises, the hollow of your bones collecting the last night//before the storm set in.

Storm Doors
Sarah Van Name

Wake up late, slow to the light. Electricity cut short like a wire sentence half finished on the way to lamps and ventilation systems. Air gets cooler now, draws the warmth from your blood, pull your arm across the chest of your husband. The monstrous wail of car tires on highway blacktop. Press and release of wind making love with the tall grass. And the long-approaching gospel of thunder roaring God’s word over your skinny shingled roof.

Underneath the sound of this salvation/condemnation, the kitten-like mewling of a child sent home early from school.

Post #3

Photo by William Eggleston

J is for Jackass
Kimberly Wang

I bet he doesn’t surprise you with lunch at work.
I bet he doesn’t buy books for you just because he thinks you’ll like them.
I bet he doesn’t stay up late with you, talking about dreams and death and jumping off the next bridge he sees.
I bet he doesn’t tell you how dark his days are or where the shadows lie.
I bet he doesn’t wake you up by kissing you hard on the mouth.
I bet he doesn’t answer the phone when you call at night.
I bet he walks differently around the kitchen, tapping a new rhythm on the granite island, one you’ve never heard.
I bet he doesn’t rent out hotel rooms for nights together.
I bet he doesn’t take you to the parts of the city that are a stranger to you both.
I bet he doesn’t call you by a different name on the phone any time a co-worker walks by.
I bet he acknowledges you in public.
Hell, I bet he even kisses you.
I bet he calls you “sunshine” in the morning on the days he realizes how lucky he is to have you.
And I bet he is happier with you.

Lucky Strike
Sarah Van Name

"They’re good for your health,” my mama used to say to me. “They’ll keep ya warm.”

She was up to two packs a day by the time I was twelve. Everything in the house – carpet, couch cushions, clothes on their hangers – smelled like smoke. Even the food she made, pale and bland, held that bitter tang.

Margaret used to watch my mama do her hair in the morning. As a boy, I had no time for such things. But sometimes, trying to drag my sister away from the green bathroom counter to assist in a baseball game or tree climbing, I would become entranced by the movement of my mama’s fingers. Quick and thin as knitting needles, they combed and tugged and wrapped the dark strands into a perfect coiffure. When she let down her hair at night, the scent of the shampoo still clung to the inner threads. Her shaken-out hair was the only thing in the house that didn’t smell like smoke.

I never started. She never offered me a cigarette, but she wouldn’t have minded if I had come home with one in hand as long as it hadn’t been taken from her pack. Margaret did just that one day when she was fourteen. I came home to find her sitting with my mama on the couch watching TV. They were looking straight ahead and smoking together. The similarities between them: the almond eyes, San Francisco street slope of the nose, the papery whiteness of the skin on their hands. It was too much. I left the room.

The summer after my sophomore year of college, I came home for a week. The University of Colorado had been good to me. I’d started hiking. I’d met a girl named Samantha entirely unlike my mother and sister – the only daughter of a midshipman in the navy, sturdy and brown. I had resisted going home the summer previous by getting a job as a clerk at a grocery store, the importance of which I had exaggerated to my mother. But Samantha was going home for a family reunion, and Margaret had been asking for me, so home I went.

When I parked my car in the driveway and walked in, the house was empty. Margaret would’ve still been at school, but at this time on a normal Wednesday my mama would be fixing herself a sandwich or doing laundry. There was a note on the counter scrawled in her jagged handwriting. “Out to lunch – Carina’s – meet me 12:15.” I looked at the clock. It was 12:22.

At Carina’s my mother was already sitting in a booth in the corner, her back to me. Her hair was still dark only at the roots, and as it grew upward the sheen of silver grew more and more pronounced in the light of the diner. The cigarette, as always, dangled like the stem of a dandelion from her fingers.

“Hey, Mama,” I said as I slid into the booth opposite her.

“Hello Jared.” She said it like that, grammatically incorrect, no comma, a statement rather than a greeting.

“How’re you doin’?”

She ignored my question and flagged down the waitress, a blonde-haired and slightly pregnant girl I recognized from high school. “Ya’ll ready?” she asked.

“Coffee and an omelette for me,” my mama said without looking at her.

“The lunch special number five for me, please,” I said.

“Comin’ right up.” She walked away, her pigtails bouncing. What was that girl’s name? Melanie, Milly? Mia? The last customer left the diner with a ring of the doorbell. Melinda disappeared into the kitchen. It struck me how odd it was, that a diner would be empty at lunchtime.

My mama turned her head slightly to the left and exhaled smoke. She looked at me directly. “I have cancer in my lungs.”

She pushed the pack of cigarettes across the table.

Maria. That was the girl’s name. Maria.

I shook a cigarette out of the pack. Lit it and breathed my mother’s life into my lungs.

Post #2

Photo by Robert Frank


Pietà
Kimberly Wang

your skeleton leaves and the
flash of pearly whites. my curtains were
sheer and you could see my lamp turned
down low.

                  Off on the mountainside is a cold creek. I remember the shape of your naked body in the spotted daylight, the glimpses I stole while pretending to not be embarrassed (Eve trying to undo her knowledge) when we went to bathe. Afterwards we sank our heels into the ground and twisted the grass with our toes, white roots and dark dirt upturned. You whispered into the ravines of my hair and pointed to the crows. We walked to that great white statue, to our Blessed Virgin Mary who stood bowed and watched over our town, over our storms and our seasons. Here you wept and I held on to your arm, like a widow clutches to her only son at the funeral (all the while, the son is thinking about how age is such a tricky thing). She is quiet, our Mary. The leaves are quiet. The ground is quiet. I listened to the air rushing out of your collapsing lungs, and I felt your trembling, and I swear I watched the shadows appear under your eyes. You were here just last week, staring into her blank eyes, having a conversation and a sandwich.
                 
                   When you return to your concrete-enforced apartment, you will, in your nervous energy, slam the windows shut and pull down the floral-print curtains we chose together. In the morning, you will replace them with some heavily-lined damask.

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Two Windows
Sarah Van Name

1. East

Light trickles through gauze curtains,

light grey-pink the color of broken skin.

Smoke already disparate and swirling

sweeps like a shock wave

across black-cat roofs and the razor-cut of the street.

I wake up to this false sunrise, fingers screaming in stiff cold.

2. West

The line of the horizon kisses the water,

kisses it black-blue like a rough-and-tumble lover.

The danger is in the mirage of the sailboat,

appearing like a supernova over that line of black and red.

But at sunset or any other time,

no boat rises.

3.

The chemical tang of home spices every breath.

Smoke is honest in its failure to promise,

and the ocean takes in too much to remember me.

I look towards what I know.

Post #1

Photo by William Eggleston


Backseat Driver
Kimberly Wang

All polyester strains and rough cotton,

safety first, that sound click,

the pressure on my chest from leaning

too far forward, as always

my outstretched hand,

this is the closest we are to contact

the seat between us empty

and my nails along the indentations 'middle'

- what a structure of white keratin

a lattice a coil a B-pleated sheet

the geometry of your folded legs is with me still

reflected now in the structure of failed trusses.

Sometimes I wake writhing in blankets

and in the shower, I find bruises.

It is easier to talk in the dark,

the contoured shadow of our five-seater Toyota

thrown each time we pass a street lamp.

You can't see the light go out in somebody's eyes.

I took my words back, but even then

you had to know

that some nights hold darkness like a cool well,

a cold hand a wet towel on the forehead

on burning eyes from a fever spread.

Other nights breed dreams of deception

and I wake fearing that I have always

been the villain.

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Sitting by the Window, Florida Summer
Sarah Van Name

Mr. Peters, widowed, getting on in age,
keeps kids’ bicycles in his house across the street.
Fixed-gear, red-blue, spokes broken.
They fly up and down the road in the summer morning.

But the rainy season has settled in strong
and mid-afternoon brings the sweet smell of acid and ozone,
and ocean-colored light.
They flutter in like dragonflies,
park their bikes by the Buick,
and scatter – pool balls after the strike –
jackets pulled over their heads,
back to houses without garages.

I see the bikes, silver and leaning,
in the dark after a late-coming rain.

That I could keep you like this in warm yellow light.
That I could hold you, like crickets hold nightsongs,
after every storm.