Paintings
She painted all sorts of paintings, my other grandmother. Lots of paintings of clowns. Nudes. When I was a kid she painted the Space Shuttle Columbia. Not the one that exploded, that was the Challenger, I saw that happen in middle school. She painted my sister a pony. She painted my other sister something I can’t remember. We all got our own. It was in her apartment in Pittsburgh, the painting I loved, hanging over the sofa. When she passed, my mother passed it on to me. When Sara and I were in Brooklyn, we hung it over our sofa.
It is blue. The sky and ocean. A man and a woman walk arm in arm, ankle deep in the surf, their footprints already washed away. A fisherman straightens his net in the foreground, almost like he’s trying to catch them. In the distance, a lighthouse guards the peninsula.
My son likes to paint volcanoes and tsunamis, pictures of cities destroyed by floods and fires. But he also paints evergreens around lakes. What he sees, what he imagines, two different things. After he draws them he drops them on the hardwood floor and they get stepped on and kicked around and recycled.
The Columbia exploded too. I forgot that. It happened years after she painted it, years after she died. It burned up over Texas when it re-entered the atmosphere. But in my painting it is forever going up, headed for the moon.
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Cells
If it is scientific fact that we swap out every cell every seven years like well-worn shoes then you and I have replaced footwear again and again since our first meeting. We are each other’s first second third pair.
If it is scientific fact that we are in slow decay, shedding our essence like flecks of rust, what explains your deepening vision, your eyes that glow a better brown each daybreak? Since birth you have become yourself six evermore perfect times. You are you times you times you times you times you times you.
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You tell me you will not tell me because…
You do not want to scare me. You do not know I do not scare easily. I am afraid of the dark, that’s true, because I cannot see the stmbles in the world ahead and because I remember the night in the next morning’s sun. And sure I am afraid of mountian lions and typos and missing the bus, but mostly I fear elusive sentences you speak, the ones that end in ellipses.
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Love poem written at 23, revised by the middle-aged gardener I have become
The danger in roses comes not from their thorns
though these fingers bear their pinprick marks
the danger in roses comes not from their scent
though it drives us to crash their petals
Turns out roses are hell to grow, prone to rot. Believe you me you’re better off growing raspberries which are in the same family though they also have small thorns that can scrape you up, but at least they’re not Himalayan blackberries. Those are dangerous pickings. Had to remove them from my yard before we could start a garden. Can’t just leave brambles in and expect the machines to know what to bulldoze. A landscaper told me he could do mine over the course of years and it’d cost years, years of our lives. I don’t know what you have here, he told me. You’ll have to remove those blackberries to see what’s there, he told me. I wore long sleeves and thick gloves, took hedge clippers, chopped the top, then dug up the roots. I was pretty proud. He didn’t even give me a compliment though.
When I moved here, the blackberries were having a great time. They were living it up. They were like dogs let loose on the side of my hill. Yeah, the problem with roses is they’re really hard to grow. Susceptible to rot. Need lots of care. It’s easier and more profitable to grow garlic.
the danger in roses comes not from their grace
though they stare down the sun with arrogant bloom
the danger comes not from roses but from you
still i trespass and risk scars to gather
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Wavelength
When she answers the phone, she is always mistaken, cradles the phone on her shoulder, speaks softly both hands open, you would never know by the way she talks. What I’m trying to say is she speaks soft and high but sings baritone. She cuts through the mist through the soggy island rain, her low voice travels further, low sounds have a longer wider wavelength migrate greater distances streak across the night across the water never arrive out of breath. When she answers the phone, she is always mistaken for a yes man, a paper pusher, a coffee fetcher, but when she sings her voice carries decrees.
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Aaron Rabinowitz is a writer of poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction. He won Meridian’s Short Prose Prize and PRISM international’s Creative Nonfiction Contest. He has held residencies in British Columbia, California, and Oregon, and was recently a writer-in-residence at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta. His writing has appeared in Grain, The Masters Review, The Malahat Review, Cherry Tree, Jabberwock Review, and elsewhere.