NOW, SHE IS A TIMEKEEPER Julia Tompkins
There is something lacking, the way Bisabuela sinks into her mattress my familiar wisp, a whiteness I can see my fingers through. She is the kind of translucent that hugs window frame in winter, a waxing melancholy, releasing histories into the bed frame so that Cuba is only a photograph propped on the bookshelf, a husband in abstract, children bring flowers but names are for the walking folk and she tumbles into atrophy, our generations overlap in uncomfortable silence. Sickness would be success now, the fragrance of interaction with something other than a poorly-stuccoed ceiling or the woman lying in the corner bed, mind plaqued over into loose ends. Her chronology was not intended to fall to pieces this way, a sharp forgetting— in the lucid moments she cries for fluency—my
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