Away From by Sherisse
In other words, the car never worked right. Pipo just let it sit in the driveway so the neighbors would think we had money. The car was a metaphor for things that never ended because they never even began. Or the other way around.
Once the car did take us someplace but only because the wind was heavy that night and the moon new. That night the ancestors were pushing us along, Pipo said. That night he said, close your eyes, or I closed them without his permission because I wanted to forget what we were leaving behind, and I knew they had been shut for a long while because when I opened them again I was in the countryside, not Pinar but something like it. Maybe only as far as Hadley, Massachusetts. It smelled like manure and tobacco leaves. It was only slightly foreign.
It was in that place that Pipo’s wife planted roses of all colors. The rose is the flower of the homesick. It grows well in to winter. And because the garden is its own universe, Pipo liked to visit it often. Between his jobs as gas attendant and shoe salesman, Pipo liked to read with one leg hanging off the side of the patio chair.
When Pipo died the women in the house were all vertigo and tears. I don’t recall the year. Endings always want to belong to another lifetime. All men who remind me of him appear as if through a rearview mirror. In that car, I am the only granddaughter. Not yet an admirer of anyone except him. I am only the story of moving away from and not yet made for speaking.
***
Other Flying Things by Alan
Berry and The Olive were not quite ghosts but disappearing nevertheless. They had made a pact several years ago that if one of them were to hum the melody of that instrumental song that was on the radio that day, the other would have to come up with the lyrics on the spot. It wasn’t quite a test but more like mutual respect. They searched the county roads for traces of themselves to pick up and place ever so gently in the trunk of someone else’s car. They believed in the emulsive power of sunny days.
One was the parent and the other the child. And then, just like that, both grew up. It’s not so much that time goes faster when you’re older or staring at photographs…it’s more the act of giving, the monolithic transfer of it, unit by unit, from one hand to the next. There is so much to name in this exchange: the exceptionality of the oval face, the look into dimension, growing hair and the like. But mostly, it’s the emptying that repeats itself, love the bat’s echo to see where it must go, eat what it must eat, draw what it will always draw – these imagined rooms to fly through from time to time chasing memory, birds, and other flying things.
***
I. Am. Not. No. Longer. Lyle
No longer my memories. Or, could I remember, perhaps they never were. This accumulation of time and… space? Of matter, both vaporous and material. Such that it leaks, or seeps out of my ears like metallic silver, these photos, these memories(?). It does have it’s prophecy (drag your finger along its edges). Still(!), memory-less, memory-conveyance, in stillness, life-quality — necessity as some people call it. I am, in my psychosis, a non-sequitur. If nothing else. But, then again, memory is not. Sequential. And, therefore, I. Am. Not. No. Longer. My. Memories. Maybe you are
