Until you lowly eaters of bread
Will be made into angels.
Out of the whole of memory, there’s one thing worthwhile: the great gift of calling back dreams.
Farewell
Tonight, a steady drizzle, streetlights smoldering in fog like funnels of light collecting rain.
I didn’t know what to expect next—a brick, maybe—so I turned off the music and laid down on the floor in the dark.
Above his desk, he’d tacked a street map of Odessa, where he’d grown up beside the Black Sea. There were circles of red ink along a few of the streets. I didn’t ask that night, but later, when I knew him better, I asked what the red circles marked.
“Good bakeries,” he said.
Chopin in Winter
She had spoken to me as if I was someone apart from the world she was shunning. Whatever her reasons for the way she was acting, whatever her secrets, I was on her side. In daydreams I proved my loyalty over and over.
No one else seemed to notice a change, but it was clear from the way he no longer soaked his feet. He still kept up the pretense of sitting there with them in the bucket. The bucket went with him the way ghosts drag chains. But he no longer went through the ritual of boiling water: boiling it until the kettle screeched for mercy, pouring so the linoleum puddled and steam clouded around him, and finally dropping in the tablet that fizzed furiously pink, releasing a faintly metallic smell like a broken thermometer.
i dont like that this reads like a college essay. . .. i’m so cooked
nvm its good
“A-flat, Opus 42. Paderewski’s favorite, remember? Chopin wrote it when he was twenty-one, in Vienna.”
“In Vienna?” Dzia-Dzia asked, then pounded the table with his fist. “Don’t tell me numbers and letters! A-flat, Z-sharp, Opus o, Opus 1,000! Who cares? You make it sound like a bingo game instead of Chopin.”
It took time for the music to fade. I kept catching wisps of it in the air shaft, behind walls and ceilings, under bathwater. Echoes traveled the pipes and wallpapered chutes, the bricked-up flues and dark hallways. Mrs. Kubiac’s building seemed riddled with its secret passageways. And, when the music finally disappeared, its channels remained, conveying silence. Not an ordinary silence of absence and emptiness, but a pure silence beyond daydream and memory, as intense as the music it replaced, which, like music, had the power to change whoever listened. It hushed the close-quartered racket of the old building. It had always been there behind the creaks and drafts and slamming doors, behind the staticky radios, and the flushings and footsteps and crackling fat, behind the wails of vacuums and kettles and babies, and the voices with their scraps of conversation and arguments and laughter floating out of flats where people locked themselves in with all that was private. Even after I no longer missed her, I could still hear the silence left behind.
Lights
i like how short this is
when i write some big collection ill have shit like this sprinkled in
Death of the Right Fielder
There were several theories as to what killed him. From the start the most popular was that he’d been shot. Perhaps from a passing car, possibly by that gang calling themselves the Jokers, who played sixteen-inch softball on the concrete diamond with painted bases in the center of the housing project, or by the Latin Lords, who didn’t play sports, period. Or maybe some pervert with a telescopic sight from a bedroom window, or a mad sniper from a water tower, or a terrorist with a silencer from the expressway overpass, or maybe it was an accident, a stray slug from a robbery, or shoot-out, or assassination attempt miles away.
No matter who pulled the trigger it seemed more plausible to ascribe his death to a bullet than to natural causes like, say, a heart attack. Young deaths are never natural; they’re all violent. Not that kids don’t die of heart attacks. But he never seemed the type. Sure, he was quiet, but not the quiet of someone always listening for the heart murmur his family repeatedly warned him about since he was old enough to play. Nor could it have been leukemia. He wasn’t a talented enough athlete to die of that. He’d have been playing center, not right, if leukemia was going to get him.
Bottle Caps
this is very cute i have few thoughts
very well written and adorable
Blight
SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE ANOTHER IMPROVEMENT FOR A GREATER CHICAGO RICHARD J. DALEY, MAYOR
giving phil eng
It was a parable. Who knows how many insect lives had been sacrificed in order for Deejo to have finally arrived at that moral?
Generations of nameless gangs had roamed the projects, then disappeared, leaving behind odd, anonymous graffiti—unsigned warnings, threats, and imprecations without the authority of a gang name behind them.
“How’d you know I played sax?” I asked her, secretly pleased that I obviously looked like someone who did.
“It was either that or you’ve got weird taste in ties. You always walk around wearing your neck strap?”
“No, I just forgot to take it off after practicing,” I explained, effortlessly slipping into my first lie to her. Actually, I had taken to wearing the neck strap for my saxophone sort of in the same way that the Mexican guys in the neighborhood wore gold chains dangling outside their T-shirts, except that instead of a cross at the end of my strap I had a little hook, which looked like a mysterious Greek letter, from which the horn was meant to hang.
North to Freedom, I kept thinking on my way to her house the first time, trying to remember all the bull I’d told her. It took over an hour and two transfers to get there. I ended up totally lost. I was used to streets that were numbered, streets that told you exactly where you were and what was coming up next. “Like knowing the latitude,” I told her.
She argued that the North Side had more class because the streets had names.
“A number lacks character, David. How can you have a feeling for a street called Twenty-second?” she asked.
Bijou
Perhaps in the film’s native country they are not familiar with abstract reductions such as black and white. There, even vanilla ice cream is robin’s-egg blue, and licorice almost amethyst when held to the sun. No matter what oppressive regime, each day vibrates with the anima of primitive paintings—continual fiesta! As ambulances siren, they flash through color changes with the rapidity of chameleons. In the modern hospital, set like a glass mural against the sea, ceiling fans oscillate like impaled wings of flamingos above the crisp rhythm of nurses.
Black and white are not native to these latitudes. And gray requires the opaque atmosphere of Antwerp or Newcastle, Pittsburgh or Vladivostok, requires the industrial revolution, laissez-faire, imperialism, Seven Year Plan, Great Leap Forward, pollution, cold war, fallout, PCB, alienation….
Near dawn, in a drunken rage, the guards take them one by one and mock their silence by tearing out their tongues with wire snips. They are forced to kneel, mouths wedged open with a wooden stake, and tongues forceped out in a scream and dark gush of blood—blue, green, yellow, orange, violet, red tongues. The tongues are collected in a coffee can the way ears are sometimes collected, and stored on the colonel’s desk. Each new victim stares at the can as he is questioned for the final time. The tongues brim over and flop to the floor and the guards pass out from drunkenness, their own tongues gaping from snoring jaws.
Nighthawks
The alley became a river in the rain—a river with currents of clattering cans and a floe of cardboard. The boy would wake to the headlights of lightning spraying the walls of his small room, and lie listening to the single note of drops pinging the metal hood of a blue bulb that glowed above a garage door. Finally, he’d go to the window and look down.
The blue bulb gave the rain a bluish gleam. Rotted drainpipes gushed like dislocated fountains. Flooded tar roofs seemed to tilt, spilling waterfalls through sluices of fire escapes.
bro has a way with rain
Love, it’s such a night, laced with running water, irreparable, riddled with a million leaks. A night shaped like a shadow thrown by your absence. Every crack trickles, every overhang drips. The screech of nighthawks has been replaced by the splash of rain. The rain falls from the height of streetlights. Each drop contains its own shattering blue bulb.
MAYOR DALEY MENTIONED!!!
But life went on that summer as it always had—daily newspapers printed in strange alphabets; nuts, cheeses, dried cod sold in the streets; the scent of crushed lemons from the bakery that made lemon ice; Greek music skirling from the restaurant downstairs. And once she’d let me in I wouldn’t leave until morning, but sometimes, in the middle of the night, I’d have to get up and pace while the dark room filled with laughter.
Yet, I would always end my walk through the paintings, standing before the diner in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Perhaps I needed its darkness to balance the radiance of the other paintings. It was night in Hopper’s painting; the diner illuminated the dark city corner with a stark light it didn’t seem capable of throwing on its own. Three customers sat at the counter as if waiting, not for something to begin, but rather to end, and I knew how effortless it would be to open my eyes and find myself waiting there, too.
He can feel his nerves jumping and his heart starting to race as if that mere sip in the diner has stoked him with the stamina of caffeine, and converted him from sleepwalking to insomnia. From somewhere in the sky above the diner, he hears the screech of a single nighthawk, and suddenly he’s happy. It seems to him enough to simply be awake like that bird soaring in the darkness that sleepers have abandoned, to be walking away from the lighted corner, down the empty, silent streets they’ve left to him, whistling as he passes dark windows, not sure where he’s going, and in no hurry to find out. It’s the middle of the night, and tomorrow seems as if it’s still 93 million miles away.
Her kiss crosses the city along a bridge arched like the bluest note of a saxophone, an unfinished bridge extending out over a night sea of sweet water.
how is nighthawks still not over
in the rain, alleys become things.
i agree
It wouldn’t be the first time he’s measured his life by imagining lovers.
oh that last bit is relateable
The Woman Who Fainted
To be free of the fear, it seemed necessary to be free of the faith. I knelt daydreaming about the woman while the mass blurred around me. I imagined her after mass, alone in an empty room, drawing the blinds and then drawing the zipper down the length of the blue-green dress. I could remember a time not long before when I believed such thoughts, especially during mass, were a sin for which I could burn. Now, the only sin that worried me was that she might somehow sense the weight of my stare on the back of her bare neck.
Pet Milk
==what i read this collection to reread!!==
It’s not that I enjoy the taste especially, but I like the way Pet milk swirls in the coffee.
There was a yellow plastic radio on her kitchen table, usually tuned to the polka station, though sometimes she’d miss it by half a notch and get the Greek station instead, or the Spanish, or the Ukrainian. In Chicago, where we lived, all the incompatible states of Europe were pressed together down at the staticky right end of the dial. She didn’t seem to notice, as long as she wasn’t hearing English.
And I remember, much later, seeing the same swirling sky in tiny liqueur glasses containing a drink called a King Alphonse: the crème de cacao rising like smoke in repeated explosions, blooming in kaleidoscopic clouds through the layer of heavy cream.
Kate and I would sometimes meet after work at the Pilsen, dressed in our proper business clothes and still feeling both a little self-conscious and glamorous, as if we were impostors wearing disguises. The place had small, round oak tables, and we’d sit in a corner under a painting called “The Street Musicians of Prague” and trade future plans as if they were escape routes. She talked of going to grad school in Europe; I wanted to apply to the Peace Corps. Our plans for the future made us laugh and feel close, but those same plans somehow made anything more than temporary between us seem impossible. It was the first time I’d ever had the feeling of missing someone I was still with.
“Rudi will understand,” I said.
The train rocked and jounced, clattering north. We were kissing, trying to catch the rhythm of the ride with our bodies. The sun bronzed the windows on our side of the train. I lifted her skirt over her knees, hiked it higher so the sun shone off her thighs, and bunched it around her waist. She wouldn’t stop kissing. She was moving her hips to pin us to each jolt of the train.
The train was braking a little from express speed, as it did each time it passed a local station. I could see blurred faces on the long wooden platform watching us pass—businessmen glancing up from folded newspapers, women clutching purses and shopping bags. I could see the expression on each face, momentarily arrested, as we flashed by. A high school kid in shirt sleeves, maybe sixteen, with books tucked under one arm and a cigarette in his mouth, caught sight of us, and in the instant before he disappeared he grinned and started to wave. Then he was gone, and I turned from the window, back to Kate, forgetting everything—the passing stations, the glowing late sky, even the sense of missing her—but that arrested wave stayed with me. It was as if I were standing on that platform, with my schoolbooks and a smoke, on one of those endlessly accumulated afternoons after school when I stood almost outside of time simply waiting for a train, and I thought how much I’d have loved seeing someone like us streaming by.