Skip to main content

Casa Nueva

We fancied ourselves builders and decided to build a house in a one day.

We collected planks of woods tossed in our alley, dug out left over arrow nails from the ground, and carried them together to the space beneath our Fletcher street porch. When we finished our south-facing wall one of us said Let’s make an experiment, and we both turned towards the blue plastic rain barrel that has always been underneath our porch.


the blue plastic rain barrel filled with dads motor oil     :the environment

our broken toys and those we found forgotten               :the variables

question:  if pushed down into the barrel which toys will drown

                              and which will be polished and playable again?

We never finished building our porch house,

We never finished the test,

We left the blue barrel uncovered—

                                                                           twelve months

                                                                           later

                                                                          when you chose dad

                                                                          and I chose mom

                                                                          the barrel overflowed onto our backyard grass

                                                                          drowning everything in sight.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dream #414

I was on a bus on my way to a new school, a high school on the south side of Chicago. I transferred to that school because I had moved into the area. The bus went south over a dark brick road bridge--it was dark because it was a gloomy day out--like the sky was heavy with rain. This new school was completely new--metal framework with floor-to-ceiling windows, open floors. The class body was mixed, with a majority being black and white students. I went to the second floor to wait in line at a check-in window. A very chatty boy behind me bumped into me and as I turned to look at him, we both felt an immediate attraction--we are both brown, we are both alternative. I'm reminded of my husband, I remembered I have a husband--maybe in that life or another--so I keep the boy in mind to feel less alone but ignore him as I wait in line. I'm outside in the vast woods that is the campus of the high school. There is a pond and there are green rolling hills of different sizes, all moving l...
Post a Comment
Read more

everything, everything, In my mind

everything happens for a reason. We need to find out what that reason is. you can't fix anything until you fix what's already been broken. everything that is happening to you is all caused by things you've already done. the reason: trying to be just like him. you did what he did when we lived in the south side. your doing it because you want him to be proud of you, to love you; and in away, you also did it because he didn't love you. Because he thought you were useless. you are not. I always wondered why we are so different when we all grew up together. Maybe because the way we each perceive the world is different; the way we choose to cope is unique to that. THAT is something that is formed. We are the way we are, and the way our brain and soul perceive is the way we react in our worlds. We are each a time portal. Since we are walking it we can't really see where we are going. We need to see outside the box; in some else's shoes; from the outside in. W...
Post a Comment
Read more

House/Home

I didn't know of any Latina writers growing up. Of the Latino writers I knew of, I knew their long pieces of work, their novels. Novels is what real writers did. Short pieces come from poets. If you want to write short pieces, you should be a poet. This is what I had learned when I was a child. When I learned about The House on Mango, I wasn't taught about the book nor about the writer, but I saved her name: Sandra Cisneros, a published writer, a published Latina writer. When I finally has the chance to get the book, I flipped through it and was immediately heartbroken--It wasn't a novel. I was still under the impression that great writers are novelists and instead of seeing the praise given to the book as a sign of great writing, I took it as a mockery. I took it as if the literary world was mocking the ability of Latina writers, as if short stories were the only thing we could do. It's complicated now for me to talk about what I felt because in truth it had nothing ...
Post a Comment
Read more