Ruben Quesada

We were given a curfew on the second day. Clouds filling windows were replaced by soot and ash from the burned out market on the corner. We lost the smell of buttered beetroot, Wissotzky tea and kishke; a tendril of root infiltrated a crack in the floorboards. We kept our distance and let it grow in disbelief. Someone said we should kill it before it gets too strong. Hours, maybe even days, went by as we hid waiting for attacks and looting to end. At times, when the door opened, a waft of wind made its way to those unfolding leaves waving like the curtains out of blown out windows.

San José, Costa Rica Tortillas clap against floured palms, steaming bowls of avena, frijoles black as the rumbling sky, arroz con pollo simmers. Against the kitchen window, small clouds rise. Papá dances to the electric beat of the marimba, his cheek bristly against Mamá’s neck; his thick fingers sift through her wispy hair. I am nowhere to be found, neither in the foreground nor background. Today I sit in this chair, in the corner of my house, covered with a poncho of blue flowers, looking out at asphalt roads overflowing with rain, fogging the glass. Along the road, steam rises like blotchy fingerprints.

as the early morning light reflected off leaves against my window I called you to say I was moving back and I cried so deeply the way I cried for weeks after I moved losing my breath hovering between waking and sleep on the day I left I stood on your balcony facing the Pacific Ocean watching the sea stretch past a gauze of power lines into a green horizon this summer I began to awaken with my body covered in a cold sweat a whippoorwill calling from beyond the ramshackle fence kept me calm through the darkness and earlier this spring my dear friend Charlie had mysteriously died and like so many secrets we shared he loved to tan turning a tone the color of a young Toni Tennille he loved to dance he loved to pray every night I lie and recite the Act of Contrition to settle my head I am sorry for my sins with all my heart in choosing to do wrong and failing to do good I have sinned against you whom I should love above all things and almost every night I’ve dreamt of Charlie reading by candlelight he is old his skin sags like the arms of a tulip tree how easy it is to listen to his voice I cradle my chin into his neck our beards brush together now as you answer the phone I hear the discordant steam of cargo ships murmur in the distance there is no reason to lie to you I have been dying since we met

As a kid the only black woman in my life was my fourth-grade teacher— I remember her not because she was black but mostly because of her copper-colored bob that never changed, as if a piece of bronze had been chiseled onto her head and neither I nor my classmates could prove it was a wig, but we knew it was too perfect to be real. Then you came in- to my home—but not the way someone came in one afternoon while we were away grocery shopping, leaving the side door wide open releasing my white-winged parakeet, my mother’s jewelry and our television, gone. And for years I watched you go from analog into digital; you were the modicum of motherhood I encountered daily while my mother stood on a production line mouthing prayers for prosperity and health in a room of air compressors. You’re a super galactic hologram—scattered light reconstructed through the dark matter, ever-shrinking pixels—shifting the cosmology of the world with gigs of Gayle, and revolutionary road trips. And now will you quietly fade out into the space- time continuum where not even my imagination will find you? Your last broadcast like the final song of our beloved parakeet as it flew past the leafless trees toward the vast dome of heaven.