i am understudy to a tired organ-grinder.

* *

I was fifteen when my seventeen-year-old sister Kaitlyn had her baby. I was sixteen when she and my brother Josh moved to Victoria.

I remember her lying in the ward bed, the thin blue hospital sheet up over her loose form, her eyes down in the baby's face. She looked deep in the baby's face and then she looked up at me and said, "Mickey, he looks just like you." Josh and I went over and looked down into the clenched little face. He did look just like me. Josh grinned.

It was my sixteenth birthday when I learned who the father was. I remember Josh standing over by the kitchen window at my grandma's, the curtain lace pattern cast on his cheek like gold stubble by the sunset. The small fluro over the cooker was flickering. Apart from that it was dim.

The aporetics of travel.
Elizabeth Bishop; the touristic world is “only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and’”