Jon Pineda

We thought nothing of it, he says, though some came so close to where we slept. I try to see him as a boy, back in the Philippines, waking to the sound of machine guns. His family would spend their morning spreading a paste over the sores of the house’s thick walls. He tells how he touched points where bullets entered, his fingers, he says, disappeared into the holes, as if inside there existed a space where everything from this world could vanish. Here we could place the memory of my sister, his daughter, who died after a car wreck. Wedge her into the smoky path & cover her in sunlight. The family next door is raking leaves in the yard. A father scolds his children for jumping into large piles he arranged into a crescent moon. We cannot hear them from inside, but I feel they are frightened as he grabs both of them around the waist & spins. I wait for the ending to my father’s story, but he is too busy smiling, as if enjoying the silence of bullets frozen there in his mind.

A basket of apples brown in our kitchen, their warm scent is the scent of ripening, and my sister, entering the room quietly, takes a seat at the table, takes up the task of peeling slowly away the blemished skins, even half-rotten ones are salvaged carefully. She makes sure to carve out the mealy flesh. For this, I am grateful. I explain,this elegy would love to save everything. She smiles at me, and before long, the empty bowl she uses fills, domed with thin slices she brushes into the mouth of a steaming pot on the stove. What can I do? I ask finally.Nothing, she says,let me finish this one thing alone.

On the tip of a hill, the silhouette is of something not of this world, the body silent in the birth of another shadow, swelling still among stars & veins. The sun dropping below the mountains left hardly any light, except what glimmers on the membrane & slips into the high grass. Alone, I pulled over to the side of 81 where semis’ blowing horns descend beyond the sloped field. Pieces of barbed wire snapped from the line. I stepped through the fence, its blood-colored rust rubbed into my hands. For a moment, it is something that stays with me, like a memory that does not give up easily. I try wiping my hands onto my jeans, but nothing. It is anything it wants to be—calf, half-life, angel—its fur a glaze of cricket sounds & cool air, a thing of stars burnt into hooves, a haze, & I stood there, not knowing whether it would be right to touch the one not breathing, its nose drying in the grass next to my hands, grit in the creases & burning now with the dust of splinters. Like flies, my fingers hover over the dead face.

Between the train's long slide and the sun ricocheting off the sea, anyone would have fallen silent in those words, the language of age in her face, the birds cawing over the broken earth, gathering near its stones and chapel doors. In the marina, the sea and its bones have grown smaller. Though the tide is out, it is not the tide nor the feathers nor the cat that jumps into the street, the dust lifting with each wing and disappearing. The rust- colored sheets that wrap the sails of ships, I don't know their name nor the way to say lips of water in Italian and mean this:  an old woman stood by the tracks until his hand stopped waving.