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  • Wildfire, and: Visiting Relatives, and: Landscape with a Waffle House, and: In Those Days
  • Benjamin Keoseyan (bio)

Wildfire

The river of heaven is smoldering tonight.So much so that we can't even see it. The firesto the northeast, at Sand Canyon, filtered out all bluesfrom the sky, and we had wine-dark sunset all afternoon.

Earlier, we drove to church in traffic,the whole city rubbernecking its way downthe 101, and when we arrived, the vesper bellstolled like a herald of that Second Coming feigned

in the July sky. The sun fell away, darkeningthe many stained-glass faces. We prayed for rain.Outside the whole world was being censedwith the crude fragrance of scorched dirt and brush.

The whole day's firelight spoke to us, reminded usof our intemperance, not in a howl or screech,but in a red whisper, a hiss. Back home in my chair,ash falls like soft summer snow below the naked void. [End Page 16]

Visiting Relatives

I have driven for hours down 99,over the Grapevine into heaven …philip levine

The photograph is of a woman, in her Greatest Generationcurls and dress, reclining cheerfully on the Kodachrome Cadillacon shining Market St. and her son now speaks to me in fables,my grandfather Alfred—torn apart by all guilt and longingafter a trip to the Holy Trinity Armenian Apostolic Churchin downtown Fresno, and Mt. Ararat in the August drought-sun.The arid heat beat down on our consciences,and there were relatives unknown to all of us.Now, poring over family photographs occupied by strangers,bygone on Ashlan Ave., my grandfather hands me what is to bethe family bible, a tattered old thing, a chronicle of deathdates and marriages in the margins, and mysteriousmen and women held still in a few gelatin silver prints.My grandfather, caught in the dog days of a ranch sold long agoand the vague anamnesis of an age-old tongue now foreignto our ears, sits here, prisoner of cancerous time, divorce,the death or abandonment of family and friends,life's supreme tragedies and fender benders, and sixty-fiveyears clocked by the harvest of citrus, grape, and nut.My grandfather cannot but feel sorrow now, my brother and Ireclining on the couch in his trailer, exhausted, nearly grown men.We silently forgive his absence. We do not remember this place,for my father is eternally errant, and when twenty years agohe fled across all America to escape these circumstances,we gave up on memory of this place, grandparents, uncles,the family histories rotting in a box, and so now, scared, I retreatfrom this past with an arm full of scratched jazz records—Brubeck, Garner, and Glen Miller among the warped dead.Returning south on the 99, I fail to feign wellness, as grief [End Page 17] wells up in my chest, and my brother senses it, its odorand weight like a thick smog trapped in the car, that same smogthat year by year washes over the whole San Joaquin Valley.He asks me if I want him to drive. I do, and when we stopfor coffee and gas at the last exit before the Grapevine, that longwinding Purgatorio out of hell and into golden Los Angeles,my pilgrim heart is searing with my grandfather's voice,on repeat: Goodbye now. I love you boys. Come back soon.Heavy with uncertainty, aware of the approaching eternity,above wheel the stars, and my brother drives us home.

Landscape with a Waffle House

On decaf summer nightswhen the air is thickerthan the dewdrops on the lawns, Isit alone in the Waffle House on 74in this bright sprawl of parkwaysin part oil-soaked and drainedwith runoff into roads and riverscracked like the man's foreheadat the hardwood booth next to mine.Across the street, I can seewee-morning grocery shopperswade into 24-hour superstore aisleslined with cartons and boxesof downcast sweatshop goodsmade in China.            Here the very roundstate trooper, after a hard day's work...

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