Antilamentation - Dorianne Laux

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read to the end just to find out who killed the cook. Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark, in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication. Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot, the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones that crimped your toes, don’t regret those. Not the nights you called god names and cursed your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch, chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness. You were meant to inhale those smoky nights over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches. You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still you end up here. Regret none of it, not one of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing, when the lights from the carnival rides were the only stars you believed in, loving them for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved. You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake, ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

Émigré ~ © Jose Varghese

No one ever asks why your home failed to contain you. They assume you’ve just grown out of it. But the signs are too clear now - you lose the bliss of belonging anywhere once home kicks you out. But you smile, and never speak of the swaying ways doors locked you out, eyes showed you the way away, mouths shut tight in frowns, as you tread indifference, to find a way out. Only a guava tree in your courtyard tried to stop you with a thud of an over-ripe fruit falling down, breaking open, its red flesh a wound that would never heal. But you couldn’t stop the words that formed you, the thoughts that made you grow - each, a leap of faith. You heard footsteps in the dark coming to hunt them down. You went away, aimless, escaped to endless wandering, spent a lifetime seeing guava in persimmon, tasting the bliss of being nothing. One day a pavement vendor, the next an office clerk in stiff shirt, and then, when you make the mark, a character full of depth - someone who could be played by Sidney Poitier, or Denzel Washington; and then, a speck of dirt in a street, a being of nothing. They celebrate your wronged, diminished life. They envy the power of your scars, long for your perpetual loneliness, fight for the ground that doesn’t exist beneath your feet. ('Luminous Echoes' anthology, Dublin: 2016)

Harlem | Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

More Lies - Karin Gottshall

Sometimes I say I’m going to meet my sister at the café— even though I have no sister—just because it’s such a beautiful thing to say. I’ve always thought so, ever since I read a novel in which two sisters were constantly meeting in cafés. Today, for example, I walked alone on the wet sidewalk, wearing my rain boots, expecting someone might ask where I was headed. I bought a steno pad and a watch battery, the store windows fogged up. Rain in April is a kind of promise, and it costs nothing. I carried a bag of books to the café and ordered tea. I like a place that’s lit by lamps. I like a place where you can hear people talk about small things, like the difference between azure and cerulean, and the price of tulips. It’s going down. I watched someone who could be my sister walk in, shaking the rain from her hair. I thought, even now florists are filling their coolers with tulips, five dollars a bundle. All over the city there are sisters. Any one of them could be mine.