Fondness Poem

after “Love Poem”

by Jake Skeets

You lie back on the sand, tight-skinned at Brighton beach white to blind — blue collarbone, square knees.

Smogged-out shells balanced on your blunt fingernails.

Your thigh swollen against my shin, a humming weight to swell and quiet me.

I span the sky and strap it to me, silk nightgown, intrusion. My body, you ask. Can it change and still be mine? The question a gift-wrapped horse in my mouth.

Your lips dried, salted fish. Smoked joint futters a white fag on sand moat, asphyxiated fopping fish. I say yes. I say no.

Desire is family. You being here is having. You make a man of my memory. Abandoned moat fills itself with good times. I stife a laugh. Your chest a blinking stoplight over Brooklyn. The sea a fooded basement bobbing with buoys and plastic bottles.

I look at your face, because you can count on me to be afraid. I waited in this city so you could come and jellyfish into the water.

You say a starling turned to lead, once, stoned from the sky onto your chest, but your arms, still thin, reveal those rooms you were raised in, full of pretty girls and their ease and their fears. A lineage I have no claim to. And I surrender.

I’m just nursemaid to your music-box.

Now you have the briar I was born with, slick with downed fat. I touch your blade, headed home on the B train — sheath lost to the waterline. It’s just me, so knock on the thick door of my study. I mean, you’re me, you’re not me.

I believe in the smell of the evening bakeries as I believe in masts. Clean people keep on the road, and stroll by to find themselves overcome with a core of drowsiness, happy like hounds, necks thick, paws sturdy.

I believe in the smell of the evening bakeries as in a weary deep and slightly withered bitter forest, its dough overturned on the curled-up city.

And later when the bread is baked in a round crust of sadness and its breath fogs the windowsills, nostrils and fists in the smell of the kitchen, in the evening, we find that our blood has never hated.

Cred în mirosul brutăriilor de seară cum cred în catarguri. Oamenii umblă în preajma lui curați și sunt năpădiți de miez somnoros și sunt fericiți ca dulăii cu gătul gros și cu labe voinice.

Cred în mirosul brutăriil or de seară ca-ntr-o subțioară adăncă și puțin veștejită pădure amară răsturnată peste orașul obosit, încolăcit.

Și tărziu când se coace pâinea în coajă de tristețe rotundă și răsufarea ei aburește pragurile, nările și pumnii deodată în mirosul bucătăriilor, seara, afăm că sângele nostru n-a urât niciodată.

* Original, written in Romanian, by Marguerite Dorian.

Fisherman ’ s Funeral

I skipped my big brother’s funeral. I’d been invited, our mother had even asked me, tears in her eyes, to write a eulogy, and I’d scowled. But you’re a writer she’d said, a comment only a mother can make, filled with appreciation and misunderstanding and resentment all at once. I told her I’m not that kind of writer. I heard his wife ended up giving the eulogy, packing it full of funny anecdotes and fish puns as she wept. Not going was perhaps the best, perhaps the only, decision I’ve ever made.

Nausea - Harshini Venkatachalam

The widow is here now. She’s dropping of the boys, seven and five. She doesn’t say anything about the funeral. She doesn’t say much of anything, and I think it’s because I look just like my brother. She can’t meet my eyes the whole time she stands in the doorway. She’s tall and blonde, a little overweight, with a raspy voice and a hollow laugh, but I do like herboys. They’re also blonde, with haircuts like she put a bowl on their heads and just cut around that, blue eyes that do not see the same things I see, gaping mouths and pouting lips that are always covered, or at least tinted, by their latest meal. Today it is lasagna. The three of us now are sitting around the table in total silence, and I feel that my decision to babysit them as their mom takes up extra shifts at the supermarket is validated. I get thirty percent of my eggs.

Do you like baseball I ask them as I open the cupboard, searching for three bags of Lays potato chips.

The older one nods and the younger one shakes his head. I look at the older one for a moment. They call him Junior and I think it’s stupid, so I say his name, my brother’s name. Benny, you remind me so much of your father.

Benny shrugs. He’s going to be a lobsterman too one day, but not the kind that drowns and leaves behind a burnt out wife and two sons. I turn to the younger one and ask, what do you wanna be when you grow up? He looks at me with those big blue eyes, and it seems as though he doesn’t speak english. When I was young, I begin to confess, I wanted to be the man on the moon.

My name would’ve been Winnipeg, Winnie for short, and I would’ve gone up thinking it was just a big thing of cheese but it’s not. And even though I like cheese, I’m not disappointed. Living on the moon is a dream.

Laughter. They think the word cheese is funny.

I can see every thing. I can moonwalk. There’s no gravity, nothing tying me down, and when I’m watching a place on earth get too depressing I can just shift focus. I love seeing the Amazon Rainforest from the moon.

Benny says he learned that the Amazon Rainforest is on fire. I tell him everything is burning. Where did your dad go?

I feel the strangest inclination to teach these kids about death. Benny answers that Daddy is lost at sea as if Daddy drove his boat too far and now he’s fishing octopus of the coast of Thailand. The younger one just stares at me. I really do look like my brother.

On the moon, you know, I would’ve seen it coming. The high tides would’ve warned me, voices tinged with regret and sorrow. Winnipeg would’ve watched what happened to your dad from a perch on a crater. He would be very sad but he wouldn’t have done anything. I tried to ask Winnipeg where the body is because I hate the thought of an empty coffin, but the letter was returned to me. I’d stamped it all wrong.

Winnipeg isn’t real Benny reminds me without a moment’s hesitation to consider everything we don’t know. The younger one looks at me, his eyes focused on the memory that I did not go to the funeral.

Two wide grins. Have you ever made your dead brother’s boys smile? It’s the same as nicotine.

- Lila Banker