Soon after the rain, no sound is heard. / No fluttering of wings. / Just a silent house in a city / and father, haunted with visions / of barely and fire.
My earliest impressions of my father are like the negatives in a reel of over-exposed 35mm film, the kind of images that were returned from the photo lab with quality control stickers, marked “light damaged.”
The relationship helps Jay achieve a sense of selfhood that promises to outlast the usual parameters of a summer romance. In a sense, he’s coming out to himself.
I remember being told Onsi was a poor artist barely able to feed his family, and my mother, an admirer of his art and a lover of nature, bought all his paintings.
As in her debut, Antigua heads off any feelings of confessional monotony by mixing her diary poems with an elegant variety of lesser confessional, more expositional poems.