ROGER A. GALVEZ

there’s a spell of timeless charm and opiate Mortalis that’s bleached from the vinyl floors daily here. the good news is washed out with the bad and the bedsheets alike, the chairs for family and friends and lovers too are sprayed to keep tears and fibres from lingering too long on their surfaces.

there’s a bed in which lays my mother.

her eyes are closed and she’s patched up with tape, and there’s conviction dripping down into her arm. she seems fragile and weak. it doesn’t suit you, ma.

when she awakes it’s sadness and joy all wrapped up into soft tamales just like she’d make them, with just enough grief to make you forget you used to hate the taste of olives. she’s lost her motherhood and malignancy all in the same procedure but her intrinsic finesse for such situations sweeps away any saline suspicions.

she’s a bounty of love that never runs dry.

she left her damage in the bedsheets there, but I took a pillowcase full of it with me.

For Christmas 2009 my mom gave me a pair of moccasins, size 10. I’m a size 9, but slippers being slippers, I didn’t mind the size difference. They weren’t the nicest slippers; they had a hard rubber sole and the leather laces were stiff. I wore them off and on for a while, and they became a regular of my at home attire. I brought them with me when I moved away, and again when I moved to the city. But by then they’d literally been duct-taped together. The laces would come undone after minutes no matter how tight I’d knot them, or how often I’d retie them. And by then the hard rubber soles would snap and leave fragments around the house as markers of where I’d been. Today, as I applied a fresh strip of tape, I thought maybe they weren’t there for me so much as I was there for them.

The radio is tuned to KISS 92.5. OMC’s “How Bizarre” is in full swing, and the refrain is coming up. ‘Every time I look around it’s in my face,’ sing the ladies from inside the honeycombed speakers on the dashboard. I’m in the backseat of my father’s burgundy station wagon, but I’m leaning forward so I can listen closely. He’s explaining to us what the lyrics mean, “cada vez que miran, ay algo enfrente.” We often received these english lectures on the fly, about what words meant and how to properly use them. That was when I was 5. Now I’m 23 and the lectures continue, only I’m asking why you say El mapa instead of La mapa, and when I speak I slur and I struggle to stay spanish and I think, How Bizarre.