January 4, 2009

The Great Molasses Flood of 1919 sounded like a joke. But still, a part of me wondered what it would be like to swim through two million gallons of molasses, floundering and floating past collapsed buildings, sweetly connected to everyone and everything around me.

December 20, 2008

The carneceria is a dirty magnet.
I can't help repeatedly going back to its raw-poultry smell,
the piles of tamale-ready corn husks,
the foreign cola in glass bottles,
bruised pears for $0.89 a pound.

The plastic pastry cabinet is next to the meat-counter
and full of Mexican pastries,
small, prehistoric armadillos, dusted with sugar.
The one time I tried one of these,
the dough smelled like raw meat and I threw it away
because it brought back some horrible feeling that I couldn't pinpoint.

But I'm a glutton for regret,
and I'm willing to make any mistake twice.
I put a squirming armadillo in a bag and head toward the checkout.

When I'm leaving,
the smiling awning above the door is inappropriately jubilant:
"CARNE! CARNE! CARNE!"

October 12, 2008

We float down the murky river and I can see us reflected in the skyscrapers' windows. They throw us back at ourselves. This one was meant to be a city within a city. This one was insulated with horse hair and cork.

July 2, 2008

It had started to rain while we sat on the cement banks of Lake Pontchartrain, halos hooked into one another like a magic trick. The raindrops were warm and as big as glass marbles, and so we got back in the car. "This is the longest bridge in the world," he said, and I took a photograph of his hand on the steering wheel, the storm forming a smoky apostrophe in the distance.

June 19, 2007

The thick, thick heat made excess seem normal, made us act before thinking, I swear.

We ate three scoops of lemon gelato in one standing, squinting in the sunlight and kicking at the pigeons. We watched an elderly man pull at a mass of hot glass like it was taffy, and we cheered him on. We couldn't find our way out of Doges Palace and had to be escorted out by a surly guard. We yelled at the bellboy of Hotel Amalfi - "This isn't your fault, Sebastian, but someone has to be blamed! Do you understand, Sebastian?!" - even though he couldn't understand a word of what we were saying. We went down to the beach and plunged our feet into the water, and we would have stolen everything in sight - pocketed every sulfur-colored seashell in the Adriatic Sea, shoved every single yellow umbrella into our carryon-luggage, caught every heavy accent in a Ziploc bag and packed it away - if it weren't for the airline weight-restrictions.

May 6th, 2007

My dad is on an aluminum ladder, attaching the ugly chandelier to the ceiling. My mom tells him to be careful to not electrocute himself, and he says, "I eat electricity for breakfast, don't worry."

September 13, 2006

In the June of 1989, my cousin and I claimed the abandoned half of my grandparents' duplex in Esfahan. Stain-glassed and fully furnished, it was the perfect place for us to be restaurateurs, puppeteers, a married couple, art gallery curators, and on especially sticky days, arctic explorers. We pushed our stories and our borrowed identities into every room of the house - the balconies were tearooms, the three-story atrium was a winter forest full of finches.

In the June of 1989, when the mourners turned the corner and poured into our street like black floodwater, my cousin and I watched from the third-floor balcony, trying to hide behind the tangles of abandoned laundry lines. The wail of the flood was raw and primitive, endless and unlike anything we'd ever heard before. Terrified, we did what we could to save our games from paralysis - we shut all the balcony doors, we hid behind the sofas in the living room, we pretended we were four-legged animals hiding in the long gold grass of some faraway savannah.

January 18, 2006:
Here are the Things that are ours so Far

We take what we can get:

The taxidermied mammals of North America.
A piece of beryl that's the color of my parents' swimming pool
on the fourth of July.
A surprised megamouth shark in a tank full of yellowing formaldehyde.

"Look at the size of that mouth. We could fit you in there,"
the man next to us says to his little girl,
lifting her up so she can see the hungry thing.

In the morning, I peel my body from yours.
Your back is all scapulae and buttons and birthmarks,
amateur cartography, your natural history.