Bread and Bread

Photo by Joshua Chehov on Unsplash After we left the hospital, I took him back to the hospital.  His eye looks puffy, I told the pediatrician in the emergency department. (A Tuesday morning, nearly empty, but haunted by the specters of our first visit. The coughing unhoused. The vocal elderly. My own spouse with her lost voice.) I don't think the infection is back. Take a few pictures throughout the day to see if anything changes, but he's probably fine. He didn't know he was telling an alcoholic to make herself a cocktail. He didn't know that document lurks just behind fight and flight . Soon my photos were a grid of my child's face. More so than usual, I mean. Close-ups, not sliding-down-the-slide shots. His brown-black eyes and smooth brown skin. But was it smooth enough? Was that sudden blush evidence of the tantrum he just had (brother reclaiming iPad) or the creep of fever? Was that a scratch or the red slash of infection? I touched each photo and spread two ...

Photo by Fredrik Öhlander on Unsplash If you were a snowflake— your mother a glacier, your arms branched and reaching— the photos would melt you.  The blast-orange light revealing a thrown-back head, flames marching along an IV tube, blaze branched, arm reaching. You would throw your cold body on the fire, turn to steam. You would mourn the loss, condemn the evil. But you are a fist of coal— not hard enough to become a diamond,  you are disappointment in the toe  of a bad child's Christmas stocking. And so you file the photos between Guilt and Luck in your dewey decimal mind.  Your mother was a librarian, your father an engineer. Their shared currency was worry. So when you wonder if you are dying, if your CBC is tea leaves, if animals can smell cancer,  is this self-love or -hatred?  Ego is a red herring, a lavender menace. And when you thought, But they're probably not even sick, they were probably in the hospital because of the war,  you crowned th...

An old woman came to our door  selling potholders she’d woven, a little grubby from her grip,  the wear and tear of having offered herself  so often You bought two, added them to our drawer, saying, “That could be me.” My dad earned good money,  but your own mother had filled a drawer with unopened bills You’re twenty years gone and I’m pushing your grandson in his stroller when a woman on Figueroa holds out a stack of potholders, a prayer written in yarn No tengo dinero, I say, and it’s true, but a block too late I realize I could have gotten cash and found her again. I could have summoned you I dream of telling your other grandson that I’m dying, trying to be honest  while softening the blow, as if  such words could ever be anything but an earthquake That could be me: leaving them, joining you. To lack the audacity of confidence—in clear bloodwork, a steady paycheck—is to leave them anyway, my head perpetually turned Lo siento, lo siento, I say to her and...