Category: Richard Garcia

by Richard Garcia

    There was a man who slept on his back in the sand with his arms raised to the sky. My arms are the twin towers, he thought, attempting to resist a dream. My feet are Babylon. My stomach is where snipers hide. There was a man who came to rescue the people. Oh really, said the people. Let us greet you with arms full of flowers. With arms. There was a man who lived in a tower, most disturbed by bees, by corrosive mold and dusty rust. By loving couples, strangers exchanging portraits in the dark, immune to peeling paint, curtains sailing about in the wind mimicking fog. We are embedded in the fog, said one stranger to another. It was dawn over Baghdad, but neither stranger believed in light.

from The ChairFind it in the library

Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2015
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.

by Richard Garcia

  The wobbly ceiling fan threatens to decapitate the poetry workshop. They write quickly and nervously. Poetry, the instructor says, is fraught with happenstance and danger. Night in the American South, but the weather, apparently misdirected, has arrived from the Arabian Desert. History enters the room, when Lila, writing about a silk dress, remembers her childless grandfather, tailor to the Shah of Iran. He had laughed at the Shah, there on his knees with his nephews. The Shah, angry, gave him one week to find a second wife who could bear children. Or else. Now Lila sits writing about silk flowing through her grandfather’s hands. The ceiling fan shakes like an airplane forcing its way through the wind.

from The ChairFind it in the library

Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2015
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.

by Richard Garcia

Blondes are disappearing from the world. Just yesterday, one sat cross-legged on my desk looking all blonde and dangerous. She was staring at her nails, which were painted deep blue. She seemed just about to speak when she disappeared, leaving her fox stole behind, its little glass eyes staring up at me.

My red-headed wife confesses she’s a blonde. And her name is not really Katherine, but Linda. That’s OK, I never knew my first wife’s real name until I was walking out the door with my golf clubs slung over my shoulder, while the cabdriver, claiming the right of salvage, gathered my neckties from the front lawn.

In a country where there are no blondes, even fake blondes can make big trouble. My wife, looking over my shoulder as I write this, says, You’ve never had a lawn, you don’t golf, and you don’t even know how to tie a necktie. Go color your roots, I say, the blonde is showing through.

The government of Sweden has convened an emergency session. Icelandic police are gathering up Icelandic blondes and taking them to an undisclosed location. Back at the office I lean back in my chair. I wonder why it’s only blonde women who are disappearing. I open up the newspaper: no more blondes in Minnesota.

I look through the files in my computer. Blondes are disappearing from my poems: the one who had tried to poison me with developer fluid; the one I ran over with a motorcycle; the one who was last seen in the Amazon jungle smearing mud on her body that contained flecks of gold; the one who tempted me to follow her out into the rain when I was in bed with the flu.

Just then my wife, roots freshly dyed copper-red, strides into my office. She sits on my desk as if she owns the place. Stares at her cobalt nails.

from The ChairFind it in the library

Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2015
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.