Do you remember our first cigarette, whether it was yours or mine, cerulean ashtrays, my stainless steel Zippo? Do you remember announcing we had to quit together, and the weeks I reached in empty pockets, as if my hands were still alone? Do you ever imagine the funny, 80-year-old face you’ll make when you don’t remember where you left your double espresso, and that you sent me to get the Jim Beam? Do you imagine your chocolate problem will grow beyond human reason? Do you remember yourself, fifteen, who I only know from photographs? There you are hiding behind Neruda. There you are underlining Salinger thinking only authors understand the sublimely lubricated appetites of fifteen-year-old girls. Do you ever imagine us sitting at adjacent desks, jonesing the way only a fifteen-year-old can and not even really know for what. Sex, surf, social justice. Do you imagine despite my pathological shyness and your adolescent sass I would have found you irresistible? I do.

neither of us would have to work. We'd stay home all day, wipe our daughter's glistening chin and harvest all her soaked-through onesies. Of course, before long, others would catch on. People would start to conceive babies just to reap spit. Park Slope alone could glut the world drool market, driving prices down, bursting spittle speculation. Newborns would be worthless, obsolete as people latched on to another fancy-Cabbage Patch Britney Rangers, glow-in-the-dark Nikes, stainless steel Escalade rims. Neglected babies would find their ways to Salvation Army thrift stores, languish by lava lamps, simmer. One Sunday after seafood frittatas and champagne cocktails, we'd happen on our own daughter in an antique store. We wouldn't recognize her at first, after all the years, the plastic surgery, the anger in her eyes. We'd reach for our cash and platinum cards then find we weren't rich enough to make it right.

He didn't notice the first ones, silent as they were, wisps of paper, folded but forever spread open, always flying but going nowhere, hanging as a multicolored mobile from lamps and steam pipes, hiding between books and dishes. They multiplied unnoticed until they filled his view of things, until he saw them even where they weren't, in the folded creases of his trousers, spider plant babies suspended from their potted parents, feline tails hanging from the sills. "A new hobby?" he asked standing in the origami aviary. "What do you mean?" she answered. "Why, our ever growing fire hazard, and by the way, did you know cranes mate for life?" "You don't say," she said, "had no idea. Just thought the place could use a little chinking up." Later came the paper frogs and fortune tellers and later still ceramic cups, post-modern paint, pastel-colored yoga mats, but they were all just passing through, while the cranes remained, flying, colors fading, until they crumbled into dust.

My wife prepares a chicken corpse. Her hands slather butter into cool skin and I can hear her twist the pepper mill and I can almost feel the grinding in my hands. I wonder if the grinding feels at all like twisting chicken necks. I watched my grandma make a chicken once across the world. She started with a prayer in the sing song cadence of her peasant tongue. It was a strange prayer, to strange gods, and to the soon to be corpse. I'm sorry, she said. I'm sorry, she said, and then the chicken screamed and then my grandma broke it's neck. The smell of chicken roasting fills me with a caffeine-crazy agitation. I can barely sit still as my wife chops chicken. She peels a piece of roasted skin and brings it to me. Thank you, I say. Thank you, I say. I never saw my grandma again and now a peasant god has made another grandma corpse. My father cries, for being here a world away, for not being the re to hand her to the earth. I'm sorry, he says. I'm sorry, he says. Late at night the same hands that slather on fowl so expertly hold me. My belly is full and I hear the sing song cadence of my wife's breath. And I feel warm more than any other thing for sometime too soon I will only know the hunger of death.

I know you were expecting something like an orgasm enclosed in the envelope from Albany. For a moment you forget it's Tuesday and there's some kind of weather to wade through, like any other Tuesday. And at the end of the river you find more water. Even wine is mostly water and even 1988 St. Julien won't give you an orgasm. It's still Tuesday and on a hill overlooking downtown Ithaca some sophomore has not even decided to weather the gauntlet you'd just as soon forget. You still can't forget to buy cat food, and water the plants. Today is the beginning and end of a five-day-forecast and another chance for an orgasm. For a moment you reminisce about the University of Dallas where it's also Tuesday. I sometimes fantasize about naming a daughter Tuesday so that once every week she'd be hard to forget. She'd dream of going to school in New York where from between all the towers she could still see the water. Someday she too would expect something like an orgasm upon buying her first condo in a perfect climate. Did you think you might be able to change the temperature next Tuesday or have more control over your orgasms? Did you think you might stop forgetting? Do you ever wonder where all the water comes from in Scottsdale? I had a similar experience in Washington. I met a woman who talked about the weather. She was concerned about New Jersey running out of water by next Tuesday. I didn't care. For a moment I forgot about the semesters as I waited for an orgasm. Will you come with me to Montego Bay next Tuesday? The weather's fine and it will be easy to forget while wading in the water between orgasms.

Rest now my mother for you have traveled as far as you can go away from home and now your mother will follow you no more. She made it over the great ocean only to pause halfway back to you never quite catching her breath wondering what to say to you when you finally turned around. Do you ever long for childhood haunts, the jungle sun, the liquid air, the burning coconut oil feeding every breath, the soil that grew the stuff of you? Would your mother choose to return to that Philippine earth to float again with the dust of home? It's a strange land you found, this rocky, Hudson Valley turf, hard with winter, echoing with a foreign voice, reverberating with the songs of different folks. Do you hear the tunes my mother? Do they sing to you? Do you cry when you see a tattered flag and hear the wails of the seventh inning stretch they way your son does? It is time to stop and cry now my mother. It is time to find a buttonhook beneath your feet either here where your own son looks across the globe and sees an alien terrain, or drenched in monsoon rain the temperature of blood, or in your own hands where it always was. Turn around and go to her my mother where ever you can find her, buried in a white man's plot, or haunting island palms, or breathing in a forgotten girl's heart. Go to her to say goodbye before you lose your voice. It is time to cry now my mother to ache for what you have lost so you can know what it is you love so you can know what it is you've found. Walk barefoot until the moss between your toes tastes like mango on a girl's lips. Go to her now halfway back to who you once were until you yearn to fly again eastward to pumpkin pie, to me, to home.

On an empty, rust-red subway rumbling on decaying tracks on an outer- borough line of my mother's memories I am searching stations after midnight. An A train close to JFK finds her newborn brother sucking at her mother's teat in a token booth while her mother's eyes shed rain that never fell on her. The token booth has no door, these two are imprisoned here, but a whiff of rank, subway air dissolved in delivery room muck declares my unplanned birth. On the skip stop back to now in the shadow of Manhattan I find my mother's metrocard discarded. She's riding on my sister's train rising to the el.

Chinese men peddle trinkets on the IRT to Flushing. Starting in Astoria no white folks continue on the Seven (save for Shea). Still, conversation makes no sense to Cantonese ears. How long were you in Hong Kong? How bad was business there to prompt descent to subways selling batteries, fake cell phones, remote control cars, to whom? Have you ever seen someone make a trinket purchase? Past Willets Point the speaking sounds of home. But chilled December air unknown in Hong Kong greets emerging Chinamen from under foreign soil. Will pocket change put their Chinese kids through school?

It is recess at P.S. 116 all day. Squeals and laughter climb school yard walls on their way to heaven. Iron bars part school yard from the street enclosing this arena for God's eyes. Homeless men, sheltered mere blocks away at riverside, trickle past on daily treks. Can Manhattan young not notice others' aching feet as livers long for priceless drink? Some men linger at the bars. Peering at the energy and joy of those too young to feel the need to search for hope. Does God observe this audience? Do homeless alcoholics care? Perhaps a child or two looks out to contemplate containment. Who are these men? What neighborhood is this, the home of P.S. 116? What is this space I travel through with them?

My chain-link door to after-hours, school yard basketball is closed by iron bars designed to keep magnet school kids away from the riff raff of the neighborhood. Smooth asphalt taunts me. In the summer wind, backboards shake a tsk tsk. They parted with donations to keep their UpperEast Side progeny protected from the underside charred in neurons of my brain, burned there by the subway rides and visits to the Lower East Side or worse-Queens, where money isn't handed down and New York City is a site of real life. Whose prison is this, the kept out, or in? Do magnet school kids really occupy a taxi-driven world where they can stay? Am I so estranged from fantasy to be poison for a child? Perhaps it's education for life in gated, cookie-cutter, acre plots of velvet- lined, white-wine-filled, graveyards on the carpool route to Scarsdale private schools.