Louisa Howerow – p. 168

Wallpaper as Ghazal

Leafless silver maples and our empty street on an android screen, morning mist – black and white pointillism, a grainy movie screen.

If the application of colour is based on scientific law, can one justify b & w between you and me? Rude/rood screens.

Let’s bid. What’s your opening lead? My tongue and feet are stilled. Sleight-of-hand, queen of hearts appears on your side of the screen.

Last spring, a squirrel nursed her young in a wide-funnel drey, wedged high in the tree, fur-lined twigs & leaves, her infants’ screen.

On the Coromandel Coast I carved beaches/beeches on pre-given panels, learned to scoop up luck, to layer more, more sunscreen.

Uncut grass lies long like seaweed washed ashore. Sand cues change, Bathers at Asnieres on your-my monitor screen.

Clumps of feather-reed grass, their narrow plumes, crest and fall in the slight wind. Between gardens, a bleached-out screen.

I don’t hear you say my name, but it’s wedged between the tongue click and “You’ve mispronounced Seurat.” Unmuted screens.

Juan Miguel Verdecia

Juan Miguel Verdecia

Raydel Castellanos

Raydel Castellanos

JC Sulzenko

Long playing

When I remember of Daryll Fletcher, I remember how he earned ‘Fletch,’ the nickname we gave him after birdsplat sullied his Blazer—fallout from a fly-past our schooner on the River Clyde.

He wanted to trash that jacket the summer we turned seventeen, the sweetness of our liberation from family turned to vinegar for this boy who favored haute cuisine over muscle-and-mind-building treks around Scottish castles, galleries, ancient churches, libraries.

He yawned a lot, staggered and lagged on trails, sweated stone steps, found solace within yellowed pages of a paperback he carried everywhere, its bulge unfortunate in his pocket. Not the Bible. Not smut. Poetry? Unlikely.

We joked he’d prefer the god of lethargy to rule him. He’d rather indulge his appetite for eggplant parmesan and steak tartar with a dash of moonshine— whether from his father’s cabinet or the trunk of a car. Bootlegging never bothered him. Other worries etched his brow.

I wondered back then what his story was. Once in a while he’d stutter over words starting with ‘S.’ He kept his laughter seal-bark short, as if to dump any humor in the nearest bin as fast as he could. He said he had a sister, never spoke of his mother. Where, how he lived, we never asked.

After a half century of not thinking about him, I search online. Up pop faces—a finance mogul and five other men around the same age he would be now, each carrying his name, each already dead. Not one resembles the Daryll I recall. Or perhaps my memory plays second to my imagination. Perhaps the boy I reconstruct never existed.