Streets
Yellowing vinyl.
That’s what I see when Alex says, ‘We grew up so poor.’ I see the cracked, yellow vinyl of my mom’s Ford Maverick, me picking at the sponge-like cushion underneath.
A tiny man and woman on a makeshift firing line.
I think of a television still photo, of a dictator and his wife shot to death. I imagine him fall, and with him the power to keep an iron wall between us. I cringe at the violence, and yet I would solder that bullet to a chain and wear it around my neck were I the chance.
Salted ice.
Alex describes the vendors who walk the streets of her town in the summer. They sell corn on the cob, cook it on the spot, the smell of diesel in the air. They wrap it in newspaper. Alex has to beg the vendor for a pinch of salt, a fine dust nothing like the heavy grains my aunt pours from a ceramic saltshaker shaped like a barnyard hen, one hole cracked wide enough so that the occasional grain of rice tumbles out. My aunt eats ice this way, sprinkling salt on top of it. She shows me a trick by laying a line of thread over the ice cube before salting it. In a moment, she lifts the string and the ice cube rises from the table. She baby sits us now that she’s dropped out of high school, unable to keep up with the lessons.
Cardboard train ticket stubs, holes punched in the middle.
I stand beside a memory of myself, invisible. I’m seething in this scene, angry over what I cannot remember. It must have been important, though. It must have been critical. It must have been serious, because all I see is the passing frustration of a moment, blind to our parallel upbringings, blind to the simple salts that brought her joy as a poor girl, blind to the passing of all those lives fighting against a world that tries so hard to keep people apart.
Tag: Pleonasm