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TRIPS ON THE FERRY AS A PASSAGE OF TIME

TRIPS ON THE FERRY AS A PASSAGE OF TIME

Artwork by Mina Amini

I travel through my biggest fear. Trust that this metal stallion will hold me all the way across. My mother didn’t have a car, so we rode on foot; I went to my old kindergarten, and my mother went to her job at the nearby diner. Everyone there knew me by name, how my mom would present me with an offering of pancakes on my days off from school, how one day, as a joke, one of my mom’s coworkers stuck two of his fingers into my mouth. How he only meant to put the two ocean water divers near my nose because he knew I hated seafood. How that was the first time a man did something to my body that made him laugh. I still hate seafood, and I threw up anyway. But my six-year-old body could only carry me to the sink, my mother furious, and at the time, I thought at me. Years later, I rode the screaming watercraft once again, tracing my steps as if I could walk back into myself; a boy, instead of my mother, stood next to me, and when everything was packed up and given away, I went home and threw up anyway.

 

Read  the first, second and third series of his poems ‘SWEET SIXTEEN’, ‘SITTING A TURTLE ALL THE WAY DOWN‘ and ‘LA MICHOACANA’ .

 


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