My mother died in the early minutes of March 21, 2012, just as spring was coming to its fullest expression in Birmingham, Alabama, the city where she was born, married, and had her children, and where she had lived her entire life. The foliage was a promising shade of bright green. The suburban lawns were visions lined with banks of azaleas in full bloom. The year was still young; as yet, the sun’s heat had no weight to it.
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I’m a writer but
my sister says
she doesn’t read books
can’t, in fact what
is she really telling me?
In the end the crumb and the ant will become
best friends and the spoon will return every sip
of soup it stole from the bowl the earthworm
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It was 9:30 on a crisp Saturday morning and the universe was fucking Denise over. She said as much to the woman on the phone. “I don’t know if you know this,” she said, “but I have an open house in half an hour and I have a whole tray of date squares in the car. I don’t have time to argue with you all morning.”
The man didn’t mean to walk past the old office, it just happened. He made a right when he didn’t have to, then a left, and there it was. He looked up at the building, counted the windows vertically until he got to six, nodded. It’d been two years since he left that place. He stared at the sixth floor windows until he heard someone call his name. He recognized Joe’s voice.
My first kiss lived in a house on Carbonate Street with stucco walls and a low iron fence. The place has since burned down, but whenever I walk past the spot where it stood I think of him. I wouldn’t recognize him now, of course, but I remember his name. You should always remember the name of the first and last person you’ve kissed, my mother said.