The Sweet Air, and: To Love, and: How It Began

The Sweet Air

The road doesn’t have a name. Once cane grew on either side. Men stood in fields with blades and filled the trucks with their hard work. When mills closed, no one cut the stalks. To their surprise, sugar cost nothing then, and work grew hard to find. They walked to shore, to town, back and forth all day. Some carried fish from the pier, fruit from the country. Everyone carried something. If a truck stopped, they climbed into the empty bed— to get a ride was better than to get where you were going, though it got you there faster. At night the road lay empty. Coqui-coqui. Coqui-coqui, tree frogs sang from the field. The field filled with the song. There was nothing human in it.

To Love

I thought you were someone. Then I thought

you were someone else. I’d heard how

you came into the heart with your great light. How this

greatness opened up to seem like emptiness

but—.   How you made

the body a body again. The story of

you. The story of you in every mouth. When the fire

swept through the house, and neighbors gathered on

the lawn, and my mother wept in back of an ambulance

until the house stood dark and hollow in

the greater dark, one man among the men

in their thick yellow suits crossed the yard to find

me standing on the walk, alone. In his gloved hands,

he held the small life I’d left inside to save my own.

How It Began

Was it a bruise? Was it the way the light

from the television fell across her face? A mis-

take, she said. An ac-cident, he said. I sat

down on the edge of their bed. What about

her call begging meto come home quick?

As my coach pulled into the drive, he asked

if I wanted him to go inside. The first

man I ever loved, how terrible it seemed. No,

I said, which was a lie. That night, in my room,

all I could hear was the film they had chosen.