Paloma: A Short Story

Paloma

You always told me that the pigeons led you home. That when the skies rained down and the water washed into your tears, instead of thinking about your saltwater polluting the atmosphere, you thought about flying. You stood in the empty slick blacktop street and revolved like a music box dancer, arms raised perpendicular to your body, finger fluttering as if they knew they were meant to be feathers.

This is how I like to picture you: I don't want to remember you with clipped wings.

You tried to tell me that in Spanish, the words for dove and pigeon are the same, and that the only difference was in how you looked at it. Or how other people looked at it. I told you to button your shirt, to please wear socks, to eat your dinner. But I never told you to look at a pigeon and call it a dove. Never.

Maybe that was it. You saw everything in the extraordinary, and I was your realist. Your muse in the mundane.

Do you know that I think about that day every night when I can't sleep? When the moon shines in my window, casting improbable shadows that all manage to look like you, and I'm suddenly lost in your world, in a nighttime horrorscape that I, suddenly, find lovely.

I count the pigeons that fly by, but none of them are doves, to me.

"Don't worry," you said, weaving your fingers into the awkward piece of hair at the back of your neck. "I'll be back in two minutes. Count them."

Did you know that I actually did? That I breathed in every second in time to the ticking of the impassive grandfather clock, losing oxygen without you to remind me it was there.

1200 seconds of breathing atmosphere vapors. Do you know what that's like?

Try a day of that. Try hours of waiting, counting stars and street lamps and drunken pedestrians. The number of times the phone rang before I picked it up, my fingers trembling like beaten drums.

There are millions of people in this city. You'd think that one of them could have stopped you. Every night I picture it; you had such an attention for details, and I know you made it picturesque. I see you standing on tar-laden rooftop shingles, pallid moonlight illuminating you from the back, standing over the city like an angel of death. I imagine you raised your arms and the light was drawn to them, that your feet left the ground with a movement of your muscles and that for a brief second, you were airborne above the city made of pinprick lights, held aloft by wings made of borrowed starlight and dreams and the knowledge that you were immortal.

Then I see you plummet, race towards the ground, and collide.

The clock stops. There is no more air in the room. The birds sit frozen on the rooftop, as if in a tableau from a bad play with static characters, and for a moment, I can almost tell them apart. Then reality hits, and I slide out of your world, out of the vibrant imaginations and movie subtitling, gasping like a newborn on the cold hardwood floor, I'm just alone in this apartment, and nothing can bring you back, no matter how I look at it.

There is one thing I wish I could tell you. You were my dove, and you didn't need to fly away to prove it.

Poems #47-51: Sincere Apologies!

Fireflies

1.
If I could meet your eyes,
I'd tell you
about the lightning bugs,
and how I forgot them.

2.
If I could remember your name,
I'd sing about the thunderstorms
and shelter.

3.
If I had one wish,
I'd waste it.

___________________________________

Stopwatch

I'll pretend for a moment
that the world spins for me,
that time and space mean nothing
and that I am certain.

Please don't ask advice
you can't receive
from me.

I'd stop the world
And breathe
The air
from space

Just to know for sure
that what I do
is mine.

__________________________________

Reflection

Show me a girl who writes poetry
Whose love notes are whispers
That tumble to ash.
Who like walking barefoot
and loves rain for dancing,
but not the pounding,
incessant dark wet.
Show me the girl who gives tattoos
like kisses, who loves to use color,
Who swings from the heartstrings
Who loves apple picking,
and cherry-tree climbing
and drawing you pictures,
and painting eyelashes-
Show me this girl who loves the mirror
but doesn't know herself; she is
the dancing in the wildflowers
trapped beneath a parking lot
waiting for the sun.
Show me this girl,
hand me the mirror,
I'll turn it back to you,
you can't see the colors unless
You open those eyes.

______________________________

The Search

What do you do,
When you’re sixteen,
and they find you?

The mail pours into your home
Like floodwater,
Smooth pamphlets that sing
Of future security and success,
All the while lying to you
With their picturesque tongues.

What if you, unlike them,
Do not have a plan?

What if all you want is to be,
To decide later and live now,
To burn the slick pamphlets,
Rip up the booklets, and finally
Hear the trees?

What do you do,
When you’re seventeen,
And it’s one year closer?

________________________________

Lillywrite

A little man
makes a little time
to try again.

The letters shake
his hand the cobwebs
holding his mind together.

Dear, he writes,
save me from myself.

Save me from becoming
what you are.

Letter 473 mailed in a box
in his attic,
carried by angels
to a god's sacred brothel,
she plucks it with pale palms
the fingers like lilies
she reads-

Dear, save me from myself.

And the little man
has little time
to lie in the snow
and wonder,
surrounded by those beautiful
pale,
waiflike
letters
like tombs.


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