A slow-moving storm has been leaning over us for hours. You can feel in the air the oncoming night of January rain, but I’m waiting in the car outside Trader Joe’s, listening to torn-off strips of conversation while people go in and come out of the store. A blonde woman in glasses calls someone Honey over the phone and gets in a car with a license plate that says MAYFLR. Some grey-bearded someone counts off the days to his birthday in the sputtering voice of an excited boy. A father leans over close to twin girls riding in front of his cart and speaks to them in gentle Spanish.
They make me think of a poem I couldn’t write about a young father and baby daughter out of El Salvador who never made it this far. Little girl tucked inside his shirt, they went down in a muddy river like they were floating home face down and I realize this amiable nothingness is everything they were dying to find.
I want to invent names for everyone and make them feel a little less like strangers. I want my phone to ring and hear someone on the other end say Honey. I want to buy the exact, improbably red apples on the poster in the window of the store.
The voices of children
come off like a song
no matter what language.
