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Graham
“Do you want me dancing at your wedding?” she cooed. She spread the cream cheese across the graham crackers because she was afraid to let me hold a knife. It was just a butter knife. She looked at the plate as she spread the cream cheese. “Dancing at your wedding, is that what you want?” She called it Philadelphia cheese and I ate it happily. By the time she got around to the second part of her question (“or sitting in the corner, wringing my hands!”) I was too busy chewing to answer. But maybe she wanted it that way. - LSC
Potluck at the co-op
Pato tips the mug toward him and lets a spurt of water escape from the kettle into the green leafy paste. He considers the mate and then takes a sip from the straw that is also a spoon and looks more like a spoon than a straw. The mate came from argentina and so did Pato, though separately. He passes the gourd-mug to me and I look only at his hands which are unremarkable if I’m being honest, but also beautiful. I sip the hot bitter mate. He asks if I like it. Its too bitter but its mate from Argentina so I don’t tell the truth. Instead I say “good.” -amo
tell
Freshwater and sea water are easy to tell, one of the first things you learn as a kid, when you start to take trips. At the aquarium downtown, there are both and three sea turtles in each of the fourteen tanks in the bayou exhibit. The tanks are set up so you could reach down in them if you were just a shade over six feet tall, even the one with the white alligator. No fence, no net. The only above is made up of a pirogue where two birds sit, a hawk and an owl, tied down, looking on.—ss
the color of the wind
trigger
The train blowing by stirred the rubble of my heart. The trigger unlatching one old memory of Blake running down those tracks away from the high school where he shot Mr. H, who lived and then lived his life better than ever before, better than the rest of us. What an art, forgiveness. And here I stand, track-side in a cemetery where my girls scrub clean the stones. They take a wire brush to the names of our dead as my mother refills their bucket from the pump and tells them stories of weddings and buses and clothelines and ruin. -LVP
blue crab
I’m not sure you’ll believe me, but you can smell the difference between a blue crab and any other breed of crab, I could tell a sally from a sook on touch alone, and even when they molt, the oil won’t come off. I knew this, apart from the smells, before I knew the lab. I could’ve told you that we’d turn to blue crabs if this ever happened. They’re small enough to be prey but with enough fight to eat some, too, and in the middle, that’s where you tell how things are shaping up. So, the blue crab.-ss
birthday, 2009.
“Put them in a shrimp boot,” Rodney said. He had given Linda the flowers, but he kept insisting that they were oriental looking. And he had forgotten a vase. She didn’t like that, either of those things. Rodney offered one of his newer boots, going so far as to try handing it to Linda. She wouldn’t even shrug him off. The flowers ended up in the kettle water, and he never realized what she was most upset about: how a man as well educated as Rodney could still insist that she acknowledge out loud that the flowers were oriental looking.-ss
