Dreamers Reading Room

The Calling

“Her eyes catch a medic alert necklace. On his right, she sees a rotary telephone, the handset firmly hooked…”

“My mother lifted me up to kiss my grandfather in his casket. I had never kissed my grandfather while he was alive…”

“Many embraced vitriolic authoritarians, who blamed our problems on the easiest scapegoat available: the immigrant…”

“The pillagers with their noisy knives, their silent radiation. You look like a moon crater with a shallow lake…”

The hospital room is crowded with chairs, monitors, an IV and the startling noise of my father’s breathing…

“Like white linen butterflies, envelopes flew and fluttered with each passing car. Refugees on the asphalt…”

“Anger’s fierce light split the shell I wore, seared this grief-bruised brain, with fiery cleansing…”

“My daughter’s line will be struck out, as that on so many others’ cards have been. Hasty burials at sea.”

She was like a hummingbird, always flighty and in movement, but my mother’s eyes were glued to the screen this time…