family
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***** a smear of days. a smear of light on the wall. the clock eats its own tail. got a number. a bad number. a cancer full of ghosts. google said: dead man. maybe. i thought: fine. i’ll just leak out quiet. didn’t tell nobody. told everybody. my boy’s voice on the phone. a crack…
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a letter to the dead… Hey Dad, it’s Monday again.I’m writing from where the cold snap brokeat 39 degrees, the mountains holding their breathlike a man waiting for test results.I wonder what sky you’re under now,if heaven is a temperature,a feeling of warmth after a long chill. Mom is okay. She still watches the news,gets…
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Hey Dad!Her tiny voice—a small, blue birdat the nest’s edge.She’d remembered her way home,but her mom wasn’t there,and I hadn’t set footthere in years. Hey sweet pea, great to hear your voice.How’s work, your new place, your husband?It sounded strange—my own words,a slow fall from grace. Chirp, chirp, she went on,a new song I’d never…
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The market was sliding and gold with it. If there were rules once, they weren’t working. Jack crumpled a Post-it. A buddy’s buddy said Go West Young Man in the seventh. Go West went south. Jack lost his reserve. He knew better. He didn’t. He scratched the bottoms of his front pockets—jeans worn thin at…
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Maybe it’s the telling that makes them live: passed on, embellished, misremembered, or lost. bb grey The old guy had stories to tell and an audience to listen. I was twelve, jumpy, and loud inside from being quiet too long—pressing a pillow over thoughts that didn’t belong. I loved stories. They were television in my…
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I had given myself a week to understand dying this time around. The news arrived with a percentage—fifty-fifty—which meant either everything or nothing, depending on how I chose to look at things as they stood. There would be no worrying about having saved enough, no being a burden to my children and what remained of…
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I feel the air against my face,tugging the hair from my eyes.The sun sings its same old refrain,assuring me the day has no end,and this kingdom of dirt and lightis mine to rule. Come here, friend, I tell a ladybug,and study her through the glass,a tiny iced donut from Winchell’s shop.When I stare too long,wings…
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from Brown and Black Days Well, it’s tax day. Sort of. Everyone knows tax day as April 15, but if you’re a live-by-the-edge, self-employed, always-worried-because-maybe-you-did-something-wrong kind of filer, then October 15 is the day you know you have for your extensions to be filed. But even that anxiety is relative. One day taxes are in…
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Chapter — The Alphabet That Couldn’t Sing I tried to build words from an alphabet that was not my own. Spanish at home, English at school. The letters felt foreign, cold to the touch, like tools meant for someone else’s hands. The sentences they made were like conversations overheard through a wall—recognizable as speech, but…
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from, Chapter 4: Walnut Season It starts like this: the end begins with the cards. For years, I kept my life organized on 3×5 index cards—neat, white, lined. They lived in small gray boxes stacked on chrome wire shelves above the kitchen sink. Stainless, or trying to be. Twenty boxes, two deep, three high. A…
BB Grey--musings 