“A blonde walks into a library—” The man starts then stops.
He is a man with a big belly in a dark, baggy sweatsuit, only slightly taller than me, and he has parked his half-sized cart in my path. Surrounded by a rainbow of grocery-store produce, we stand in a band of green, between bunches of cut asparagus upright in stagnant water and mounds of round …
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She emerges wearing a welder’s mask (I try
not to stare) because the blood will splatter
under her electric drill—a Black &
Decker used to filter flesh and bone from
infection, keening into the body, uninvited.
She is a dyke, short and mean. Tuesdays,
I file records until nine. She stays late without
ever looking at me. Leaning over the charts,
pen in sinister hand, she scrawls T-cell counts,
viral loads, whether Edwin or …
The kind of thing I see in movies/memories
when there are dark basements involved. He sat on the small of her back, cupped her chin with one palm, her forehead with the other, forced her to watch the video. Consider the narrative of flatness. To be flat is to be walked on. Pillows covered half-sized windows. Whether she tried to close her eyes or not, he …
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for Reshma Qureshi
Mustard flowers stipple the olive and emerald fields
as dusty buffalos wallow in shrinking mud pools.
Women wash pink dupattas and fading purple kurtas
and children hop and chase stone bits
on crisscrossed baked-brick courtyards.
The evening sky blazes tangerine as sister and I walk home
My brother (by law) and his three friends fence us off
on the lone …
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