Inlay

She bought it when burglars were sweeping the subdivision, stealing electronics, tearing big screen televisions right off walls, rummaging through personal intimate belongings nobody was ever supposed to see. Fearing victimhood, our paranoid friend installed protection. There’d be warning if someone sinister approached. Defenseless damsel would have time for double-locking valuables, hiding unmentionables, grabbing baseball bat. At first, Second Sight, aptly named, posted generic messages. Person. Cat. Motion. Then more detailed descriptions followed. Man walking. Woman pushing stroller. Dog peeing. Technology proved its worth. Alarmed single female could rest easier. Robbers undetected. Whew. Soon though, re-dubbed Nosy Neighbor, got smarter. Poodle burying bone. Mail carrier rough-tossing package. Next door bachelor’s loser ex snooping. Teenage yard boy leaning upon rake thinking about losing virginity after prom. Did anyone really need know all that? Certainly not this lady minding only individual business. Still dealing with such particular info remained doable until rechristened Scary Stalker ventured too close. Details coming from inside. Picking your nose? Aren’t you putting on extra pounds? Four glasses of wine? Miss M had enough. Ripping out device, hammer-banging, throwing into garbage. Done. Looters. Pillagers. Thieves. Who cares?

I start in the monsoon when the river was swollen with silt and the debris of broken tea trees, crushed lantana and the dropped unripe fruit the orchard shed before the seed could be viable. I am carried with the flood, fingernails crescents of mud, swept into sidestreams that do not bear any name, and my skin sloughs off, my own name silt in the riverbed. My babies, too, driftwood children, submerged, emerging, finding lodging in the rock then working their way loose, twisting like a compass needle, yearning not for north but for sea. Can I call them babies if I did not birth them, but merely allowed them to fall from my pelvis, ignored sloughings, the detritus of meaningless life? What if I let them subsist on whatever they could grasp and they grew up half-salt, half-scavenged sugar and just a little fish? Perhaps a line will hook them, give them meaning through a swift blow, gutting, scaling, guts thrown to their brothers. Perhaps they will find themselves homed in mangrove muck or in some amphibious god’s estuary haven. My dreams mean nothing - children propel themselves on their own tides, breathe their own air. Listen: the thunder is summoning the drenching, that storm’s coming for the mountains again. The river in spate, I swim helpless, rainsick, to the source.

Bluesman howls at the paper moon, slinks down stinking back alleys with his beat up electric and air force duffel he tells folks was his fighter pilot Grandaddy’s, real hero shit, man, so what if he got it at the Army Surplus, if Grandaddy never saw action, he was still an angry son-of-a who drank himself to death. Bluesman splashes his busking cash on diner breakfasts, over-easy eggs and bottomless coffees, ‘cause he ain’t dying hungry, and Bluesman’s got no home since his parents died and his bitch of a sister ran off, and yeah, maybe he’s a bit messed up, you know, in the head, but some days are clear glassy ocean, man, until the memories start sifting like sugar powder sand, and those are the nights he wakes up screaming. Bluesman likes riding the rails, buses, subway lines, anything that keeps him moving, ‘cause when you stop, when you get cold, that’s when shit gets dangerous, man, so just keep rockin-rollin-ridin’ till you can find a beautiful woman to take you home, but Bluesman don’t mind, so what if he sleeps some nights under the bridge, he’s a Bluesman, this life chose him. Bluesman ain’t scared of nothing, except maybe starving, or never seeing home again, the lake an unbroken mirror, pine trees piercing pitch night sky, and the stars, I swear man, more stars than anywhere on earth, where he’d sit out on the deck with his kid sister just looking up, and the howling wasn’t so loud back then, he could pretend everything was fine, just fine Sis, man, do those marigolds ever smell like Ma, and maybe someday they’ll do it again, if she’d just say he was right, that none of it’s his fault, maybe then he could forgive her. Maybe he already has.