Concord Medicinal Mushroom Specialist

44th St, Wednesday after 7 PM, Parking 3 Blocks East

Carefree Food Service Film 18" x 2000"

It's too cold to eat outside, so people eat in the Winter Garden.  

This room was designed by the same man who made the Petronas Towers. It was rebuilt and replanted after shockwaves of dust obliterated the towering panes of glass.  

The floors are made of polished marble with a grain so intricate, it recalls the glass slides loaded with specimen cells we marveled at in Biology.

Among the trees in the Winter Garden live a trio of sparrows.  

Each time a crumb drops, the sparrows fall from their perches and glide down toward their morsel, but as they touch down they skate several centimeters in the wrong direction, the floors are so smooth. They then quickly hop six or seven steps to regain their meal, pick quickly and are off again to their next. 

Village, 10 PM on a Monday

Exit 39

Past Pitch Kettle Rd, a sign to Smokey Ordinary, the Davis Travel Center sells pickled quail eggs. 

The brown banks of 1-85 grow skinny pines and scrub oaks. Poorhouse Rd, Cutbank Church Rd pass overhead. Spring green breaks the sheltering trees. Speed limit enforced by aircraft.  

At the Pleasant Valley Shopping Center there's an oak in bloom on the manicured median strip, an Office Max, a Marshalls and a Dollar Tree.

Across from a bus shelter near historical Wilmington,Tobacco Outlet, EZ LOAN$, there's a ladder to the Super Fresh Food Market sign that rises three stories high above the power lines and fume hoods of the neighboring Super Suds.

Crossing the Verrazano behind the A&A luxury coach, I left a pound of coffee in the freezer at the Residence Inn and a pack of eight hotdogs in the fridge.  A silk worm was hanging from the brass spar of the luggage cart.

April

Seven boys were buried to their necks at the beach below the Plaza San Juan Bautista.

It was like a local secret, a treatment devised in the dungeons of the Castillo de San Cristobal and that relic, high on the windward bluff above their heads, fed a handful of kites to the sky. They nearly slept, stirring the sand with the life left in their toes.

Like the daring roots of some cliffside tree, they dug themselves down to the edge of the breaker's reach, to better sense each wave's weight from beneath their blanket beach.

It took some time but each one rose then washed the sand away then climbed the bluff to go about their day.

March

In Old San Juan, after a morning spent on the beach reading The Castle and watching the waves break against the reefs, I drank two cans of Medalla Light and ate a ham and cheese on sweet mallorca bread before taking my afternoon nap. The dreams I had were full of strange architecture, old friends and work acquaintances.

There's a recurring architecture in my dreams, somewhere between the corridors of Doom, the expansiveness of Boullee and the recursion of Borges' The Library of Babel.

   

Before I went to sleep, I went out on the balcony, which overlooked the neighboring rooftops. There was a puddle on one of the rooftops.  It cast a reflection on the aluminum panel of a ventilation hood. The brightness of that reflection seemed to be a constant light throughout the dream.

The light was so strong I had to wrap my hands around it and squeeze it down into a cone.

When I woke up, my tongue moved against the roof of my mouth trying to rid itself of the sticky coat from the light beer.

The puddle had evaporated in the late day heat and the evening had crushed out the heat.

SUVs poured down the Calle Fortelaza pumping music out of their half-open windows.    

 Bats dropped down from a nearby eave and wheeled through the pumping sounds, making their erratic black swipes before the pink and pineapple paint of an old plaster wall.