“What you got there, ol’ man?” He raised his head and met the bloodshot eyes of the skinny guy on the neighbouring cot who had just spoken. Another junkie. Or tweaker. Or crackhead. Same difference. Like all the young ones in the shelter. He looked back down at the tattered newspaper clippings he had spilled
Parched He looks around uncertainly, focuses on what has changed. His glasses are gone, hearing aid too; no socks, loose slippers, he’s wearing someone else’s shirt. The tv’s a long way off and muted. So many faces he can’t place. There are screams and sobs; bodies sleep or rock in wipe clean wing chairs. In
The Most Humble Love is nestled deep In the hearts of the most humble They are the lost The forsaken we only speak of As if this makes us care Our thoughts, only echos Bouncing off their dreams Small change, petty offerings Pools of pity at their feet This is not love Love hides In
A Short History of Epiphany And what might the difference have been if Three Queens came bearing gifts. “An evolutionary epiphany,” they declare. Imagine if the Queens came first, even if superseded by three patriarchs bearing gold (the capitalists); frankincense (down a long church history of swinging censors); sticky myrrh (more often used in embalming.)
Edna’s Mouth Edna and her mouth. They are never separate. Electric pink gums that are slowly receding from the ocher-rimmed peg teeth. “People with mouths like that go nowhere in life,” your mother said as she was spending a wad on the orthodontics that would take over your face for two years. It’s true. Who
Bellum. When the war came for us, we locked the remnants of our dreams inside our gap tooth & sprinted for fear that it would swallow us like it did our homes. When the war walked into our city during the sky’s siesta, we thrashed a mother’s lips with these cracked feets, in search of
homeless: greenway note: the black sheep brothers sleep on the biking greenway, the path from here to eternity or bella vista, missouri anyway. sisters too, splayed, displayed on the asphalt, passed out, eyes shut, cans and bottles, mouths open, ragtag shirts, skirts, shoes, toiletries heaped on the rage of wet grass. and this: four thousand
THE MANSION [ EXCERPT ] ______________________ June 2006: It felt good to be in the old neighbourhood– Travelling to a vegan potluck at a house On Sutter Street on foot gave me A chance to see my first home in the city again. In between a Solid brick Black Protestant church & Expensive luxury condominiums
The old house, built in 1895, was the best of weathered antiques having hugged North Rogers Street from days of horses to days of horse-powered engines, and now to electric cars. As the story goes, Grandad purchased the old house shortly after returning from WWI by merely signing his name on a blank piece of
“Never trust a man, Hina. They’re all scum.” I was nine years old when my mother first said this to me. She had failed yet again to secure a divorce from my father in Pakistan—her second attempt at doing so. The first time she tried, I was five and remember the day we came back
