In retaliation for my abandonment, I liberated my grandmother’s beloved parakeets from their cage on the balcony. I watched as they fluttered onto the leafy branches of the cottonwood tree across the street, jealous of their ability to go anyplace they liked.

She always sat by herself,

The head judge summons me to a bunker-like lounge, reminding me that Oberstdorf was once a Wehrmacht training ground.

Well, that’s the million dollar question, right?

I’m panicking.
My heart is beating out of my chest.
I’m thinking of TRAYVON,
AHMAUD,
TAMIR,
MIKE.

I hope I’m not being intrusive when I ask this, but why were you crying? I know I was a stranger and who would want to air their grievances like so much drying laundry, to a stranger?

Oh. Pipped pea pod. Lately lemon. Now, apple. Next, you will be avocado if we get that far.

I once was encouraged to build a place
that would hold every idea
I needed to retrieve
Something elephantine
that would stand
for ages

“…And then there’s the sponge. Rank. Smelly. I have treated it with respect, drying it nightly in the dishrack, even microwaving away the microbes to prevent the rotting smell as my sister taught me. Yet here it is, punching me with its rottingness.”

One day you learned to read and gave me monkey hugs…

At home, Cassy barely got the door open before her cat, Toby, was weaving between her legs. “Dude you’re going to kill me. The doc says it will be suffocating. Won’t he be surprised when it’s you?”

People said it was safer here, away from the cities. Less shelling. But being far away means you eventually run out of things, like gasoline and medicine.

When I first met you, I was green

…the saxophone simmers on my senses and the clarinet caresses my soul, as the baritone sings, his voice oozing like Belgian chocolates…

He spent the day out in the saguaro garden, trying to get abducted.

Double rows of twenty men tramped by us, swinging chain-whips on handles, whirling in time, the grit of metal snapping down on bruised and bleeding backs.

The guide leads us to another tree, and this one is “unique in all the world,” he says. I wonder who else in our little group, besides you and me, knows that line from The Little Prince.

A bad spirit with short legs.

We live. We die. Some early, some late.

Sparrows in the chinaberry tree

in my great-grandmother’s front yard

where I lay on my fat belly

book on the ground—opened—