Nothing is thrown away — this immigrant lives in fear of waste. Old yoghurt starts a new batch. Images glitch and flow. What is worth risking for things to get juicy, rare, ripe? What might be discovered on the verge of things going bad?
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You can ask my friends—I drove Ludicrous for all of them. But it wasn’t that fun. People felt nauseous and knocked around. I get it. They weren’t falling apart like we were, so that thin disintegrating feeling wasn’t exactly hilarious for them…
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—For my mother, Zita, upon hearing her terminal diagnosis *
1
Just missing
the heart
and below,
in Portuguese,
in stiff, serif type:
“portrait”;
I watched the land unspool and thought about meteorites, the fleeting beauty of a shooting star. How strange that some lives barely last an hour, while others stretch one hundred years. We were never going to know whether it was the meds that caused it, or whether her sister would have taken her own life either way…
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Mother Mary is my sister. Shocking to say, but she’s the one who said it. She looked down at me from the stained glass window during a mass at Saint-Joseph-des-Carmes, her lap full of a baby boy the same size as mine, and she called me sister...
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My best friend lives in San Francisco, in a room in Polk Gulch that fits a double bed and a table for $1100 a month. Weekdays he gets up early and does manual labor, then walks to the Tenderloin to buy heroin when he has the money for it and Xanax when he doesn’t. This week, he has the money…
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