A haibun

This is an immigrant’s building across a mall with one dollar stores and an empty parking lot. I can hear my neighbours. I can hear the walls: a bit of sand, or water, or a mouse, trickling down. In the apartment next door, a woman prays. She sounds close, we sit next to each other, there’s only a screen between us. She improvises and repeats her calls , we put ourselves in your hands, oh God, Alleluia, yes Lord, Thank You Jesus. Her voice shakes, and I imagine a pair of hands pleading for a child, or a father. We share a February Monday framed in dead sidewalks and the ink skeletons of a couple of trees. In this building we can hear each other, but all our voices traveled a long distance and all our breaths started many miles away. I close my eyes and think of my mom in Mexico, stuck to a bed in her living room, unable to walk into her garden. I think of her garden, visited some mornings by a family of horses: three honey figures moving without hurry in their own tenderness. I think of my mom’s lemon tree, which fruits she doesn’t mind to be stolen, and her cypress trees, which she says are eager to reach the sky. I don’t believe in Jesus, or God, but I say out loud, along my neighbour: Please.

in quiet winter

the smell of tangerines