Rome, New York
after Austin Araujo
In my favorite picture of you, the hair blown across
your face, obscuring your face, it’s easy to make out,
deep in the distance, the hangers of the air force base
classified as a superfund site, a sprawling huddle
of buildings expanding out into the extent of the valley.
By SOFI STAMBO
Excerpted from A Bunch of Savages, a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2024.
Baba Borka
I absolutely have to go to Coney Island every weekend. People think that’s strange. Luckily, lately I don’t care if people love me, like I did before. I used to suffer and blush and stay home and cry. Not anymore—I grew up and out of this. One day I woke up and realized that it doesn’t matter if I am well-liked or not. What matters is to get up at six, go to work, calculate for fifty hours, get yelled at, watch people get bullied, stay calm, and not kill anyone.
I can definitely do this, but with huge quantities of Coney Island.
I need to step into this postcard image of sea, sand, salt, and seagulls. This is my comfort zone. I don’t need anything else. Unless we are going for perfect, then maybe a peeled peach, and my grandmother to peel it.
Summer always starts with her glittering, gold-toothed smile. In the morning, the night train from the capital arrives at the old station in Varna. My small grandmother and huge grandfather are running toward us, they always ran, with bouquets for my mother, my sister, and me. These dahlias have been planted, watered, and weeded months ago for us. They’d been cut an hour before. The seagulls scream, it smells like sea, the station shines wet from the fog and bright from the sun and the smiles of my people.
Lake Katrine, NY
I visit with a friend as she works to empty her mother’s house, who died just days before Christmas, and each object holds a tiny piece of Susan. I come away with several treasures lovely (a hand knitted scarf, a clay donkey to hold my garlic) and practical (a metal frog for summer flower arranging, a switchplate for the guest bedroom).
This small home was itself a downsize, and these many items are the survivors of her mother’s own earlier culling, so are a little piecemeal, each one tasked with balancing an eager backstory on its tiny shoulders. More than two of anything inspires commentary, my attempt to make knowledge in place of the knowing I hadn’t sought earlier: She must have liked Edith Wharton or She had quite a collection, here. My friend’s own childhood artwork hangs in several places, and each flutters with a colored post-it; I’ve arrived too late for those.
Long Island, NY
Interior of a silver Volvo wagon, back door pockets stuffed with Candy Ring wrappers, pencils, and rocks; I am looking in the rear-view mirror or over my right shoulder into the backseat, my left hand on the wheel, right hand on the seat back next to me. Two small boys, both with eyes the exact color as my own, stare back at me, pleading or explaining or demanding or questioning or laughing or crying or sulking or fighting or trying to hide. The car smells vaguely Cheerio-like. No matter the music, the soundtrack is chatter and the rhythmic kicking of a seat back. They also like punching each other’s seat warmer buttons with their feet to be annoying.
We called him Ísjaki. Few knew his real name. I certainly didn’t when I was charged with being his caretaker during his first visit to New York. Ísjaki meant “iceberg” in Iceland, where this man came from.
Dedicated to Reina Yolanda Burdie
I was in Egypt nine months before the towers fell.
The people spoke to me in Arabic Roh Rohi
but I spoke back in English so they called me “American”
/I never called myself American.
America never called me American – not without a hyphen.
Saturday night I’m at the kitchen window listening to my neighbors fight. Theirs is the only light on, pungent and pouring out onto the fire escape, illuminating a coffee can. I’ve counted five cigarette butts so far.
“I can’t keep doing this, bro,” the girl shouts. Glass shatters thick against a wall in their apartment. “I can’t keep doing and doing this.”
The kettle screeches and out goes the mug in my hand and the spoiled red wine all over the windowsill and all over me. Who knows why I’ve set water to boil. A jilted habit of steeping tea to sleep when I had patience with myself. A phantom limb.
There’s a sprint of shouts, one voice trampling another, and then a long, feral cry. My cat when I was a kid yowled like that when she pawed at a mouse trap. We freed her and she crawled into my mother’s dresser where she stayed for weeks and weeks, burrowing into her fear. The world became a mouse trap.
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