We’ve had this talk before when I didn’t know who else would listen to me standing at the last bench of Leona Canyon—you know the one—dedicated to the Jalquin people circled by dried thistles like petrified tongues? How you drifted from the house before ashtrays were emptied, butts crushed and sealed with a blossom of lipstick, the kind of Revlon your friends could afford, neighbors who presented you with blobs of chicken fat glistening outside the apartment door. Wished you hadn’t walked out on me so early-that’s how it started; I chewed a slice of rye bread, a golem dipped in fat and molded against my tongue, my teeth, a denture mixed with saliva, concocted stories about you when I had no good reason. My little talky man hated that you weren’t there for each fork in my fairytale–graduation, marriage, birth, emptiness without a streambed. I lost control. Sometimes I heard him in his room sobbing. We are no longer the chosen people. History has moved along from Charlton Heston playing Moses on the big screen, now we’ve got the shock jock Howard, not the Mom and Pop jokes of the Borscht Belt, babbling stuff like that. Some say the only good Jew is a dead Jew. Living in this crazy world, I fly like a pigeon, land on windowsills and stare at my reflection in glass.
