I’ve started to inhale the longing you must have felt
as you wrote those poems to her.

I walk through my garden thinking of her now,
letting my hands rest on the yellow roses I planted last year.

I can see you weeping by the edge of the green meadow,
watching the hedgerows of hawthorn stretch to the horizon.

Your sorrow and love mingled into an exquisite aroma
that floats into the breeze to find her.

Hope rises because that’s how love drives you.

I know your quarrel.

It sits between regret and action.

Neither takes you anywhere except to your pen and paper.

Leaving behind an ache
that stretched beyond a century
into the air around me.

no,
I will not eat
piquillo peppers
on that bench with you.

A piston loose in the breeze.

It moves with a reluctant grace.

It knows only motion through the avail of other metal things,
but its soul knows it can create energy on its own.

The rigid, dark-green leaves of mint, sitting at the bottom of the glass,
fold in on themselves as ice beats them into submission; a mechanical rupture releases their true essence.

Ice is their Damocles.

Fear not for my soul,
my wings are made of iron,
my heart is obsidian,
as light as I imagine myself to be.

I crash against my soul,
and then run from the edges that rise up to meet me.

Phlebas drowned at sea.

In my own sea
I am Damocles.

Lip to cup
tilt
swallow
cup to saucer.

This porcelain cup proves my existence.
It’s a lineage, so to speak.
Handed down to me from my mother
and her mother.

I use it to feel connected to the past,
to a feeling from my past
a memory of those moments.

Sunday dinners
a table with family
a small family that felt no burden
grandfather, grandmother, mother, brother, sister.

Now, we are all somewhere else in time.

Separate, each held captive by a whisper
of what once was,
remembering those who have left us
but forgetting who still stands.

A memory now faded,
edited to remember the moments
that wrap their invisible arms
around me
and comfort me.

Lip to cup
tilt
swallow
cup to saucer.

This porcelain cup doesn’t remember the other moments
my brain has carefully curated
without my knowledge.

This cup and saucer are soft in my hands
it clinks on the saucer when I put it down
in the way porcelain always does.

delicate and pronounced simultaneously,
that’s power.

Lip to cup
tilt
swallow
cup to saucer.

The ridge of cold inlay around its delicate lip
is a lozenge that soothes my mind
a magic carpet ride to another
memory
in
time.

In memory of the beautiful, majestic soul of my grandfather, Edward Kendrick Pounds, on his birthday today, Feb. 17, 1915. He is forever in my heart.

In a way, she was not far off. Paul was raised by artists who did not bend to the world. His mother, Eloise Woodruff, was from Jackson, Mississippi, and found her artistic style at a time when women were expected to paint magnolias and camellias in polite landscapes, not to command a studio or sit as the muse for a man. Yet she did both. She became an acclaimed abstract impressionist in her own right and defied the unwritten expectations of her hometown. Her friendship with writers and painters earned whispers back home, but she moved through the Southern art world with a commanding stillness.

Paul’s father, Grady Jones, was a controversial sculptor in Venice Beach whose work often unsettled more than it pleased. Eloise and Grady lived apart more than they lived together and loved each other in a way that did not follow the rules of the day. In the big and small, even trivial moments of life, they came together for Paul and made sure he grew up knowing they loved each other without needing to live under the same roof.

Neither parent gave up their creative environment, so Paul shuffled between Venice Beach and Jackson, Mississippi, under the guise of creative freedom.

It is an understatement to say he was charismatic and confident. Between the characters of Venice Beach in the seventies and the dulcet sounds of the deep South, Paul had learned how to illuminate the human condition through photography.

Paul was instrumental in founding The Project, a shifting constellation of photographers and artists in the 1990s who met in borrowed studios and half-lit apartments, chasing new experiments and small rebellions. Mexico City in the nineties was electric and dangerously unstable, and The Project fed on both. They worked with whatever they could find. No one in the group thought they were shaping a movement, but they were. Years later, critics would call The Project a turning point in Latin American art, but in reality, it was only a handful of young artists working with cheap film and dangerous neighborhoods trying to make something honest.

His photographs of marginalized communities, women in the sex trade, people struggling to survive, and those victimized by cartel violence gave him a voice when he lived with Renata in Mexico City. His candid work from the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods had even started to gain attention in avant-garde galleries.

Unlike Renata, who had no one to shape a path for her, Paul developed a taste for creative freedom from his time with his parents in California and the Deep South. Paul’s father took him up and down the California coast searching for beautiful things to experience and sculpt. One trip took them to La Paz when Paul was a boy, so his father could sculpt the sea, as he put it. The La Paz sculpture series became his father’s most iconic work and now sits in a modern art museum in LA.

After college, Paul returned to La Paz, where he met the woman complaining about his inability to shower without turning the bathroom into the sea.

She grumbled at being left alone in the bed. She rolled toward the window where the morning light had shifted across their apartment and cast a broad shadow on the wall.

She touched her arm. The bruise. The reddish purple had spread across her forearm. How had she missed it? A shiver moved across her shoulders.

Suddenly, Paul popped out of the bathroom like a jack-in-the-box, water dripping from his hair. He kissed her forehead.

“I have an idea,” he said, still dripping, grinning like he had invented joy. “It’s a loco idea, actually.”

She raised an eyebrow. He always had a loco idea.

“Why don’t we go out dancing?” He snapped his fingers and did a ridiculous shoulder shuffle.

“Or go to that new whiskey bar over in the fancy pants part of town. You can watch me turn into that American guy you fell in love with.”

Despite herself, Renata smiled. He was impossible. For a second, she drifted back into the feeling of their bodies tangled that morning, a brief sense of safety.

“Okay,” she said, pulling her robe around her arm to hide the bruise. “But no camera this time, si?”

“No camera.” He lifted both hands in surrender.

“Wait,” she said. “I thought you were working with The Project tonight, wandering the streets looking for the best shots of the worst people in the most dangerous places?”

Paul laughed. “I was, but this is more important, you know, being your heavy and drinking whiskey.”

She smiled, the joy of Paul creeping into her psyche. “I don’t want you to miss a chance for culture-changing photographs; the gallery won’t wait forever.”

“They will live,” he said while looking for a shirt to wear.

“And those kids you photograph in these neighborhoods,” the worry creeping back into her voice, “Are you sure you trust them?”

He waved it off with a soft pff, the half-French dismissal he picked up on a trip to Paris with his mother as a teen. When he came back to Jackson, he pff’d at everything until his mother threatened to throw him out if he did it again.

“They are just kids. They grew up in those alleys. They want to learn photography, not snitch for anybody.”

He sat down beside her, crinkled shirt in hand, and nudged her shoulder with his.

“These photos are going to make me, amor.” He flashed that crooked grin she once mistook for invincibility. “We live the life together!”

She leaned into him, wanting the life he saw, a future where the bruise did not matter and shadows turned into light.

“Okay,” she whispered. But inside, something pulled in the opposite direction, a tension between love and fear that kept reaching for her.

“Settled,” he said. “Now get dressed before I change my mind and we dance right here.”

She giggled and caught herself in a moment of joy.

The day moved around Renata in small, ordinary ways. Paul left with his camera in tow to check in with The Project, promising not to stay long, though she knew how he lost time when he had a camera in his hand. Renata drifted through the apartment, letting time pass without reprisal. By the time Paul returned, the sun was dropping behind the buildings, and the city had shifted into its regular nighttime pulse. Renata was actually excited to go out, and as they hailed a smoke-filled taxi outside their apartment, neither of them noticed the man in the gray suit leaning under the glow of the streetlamp.

The air was warm that night, heavy with dust and the smell of gasoline and street food. Neon lights bounced along the sidewalks, illuminating the faces of people who had forgotten the city was collapsing under the decay of the past. Renata and Paul leaned over their small table, intimately talking and laughing over melting ice in their whiskey drinks.

For a while, things felt light, easy. She forgot her bruise; the city was almost harmless. Renata raised her fingers into a camera frame and mocked him in her thickest American accent.

“Oh, hi, I’m Paul, I’m a famous American photographer. Can I take your photo? I’m so cool. I’m from LA you heard of that town? Hollywood, baby.”

She backed away, air-photographing him. “Smile for me, give me more sizzle. Flip your hair.”

Paul doubled over laughing, “You are out of control.”

Renata kept backing up, clicking her air camera, laughing, until she collided with someone behind her. The air around her shifted, shrinking as if the night was closing in around her. The man she backed into stood unnervingly still. A tailored gray suit. Silver cufflinks catching the neon. A face too composed for a place like this.

“Señorita,” he said. “Be careful where you put your feet.”

His tone was not harsh. That made it worse. Something in the quiet way he spoke moved through her skin.

Paul straightened, and the smile left his face. “Is there a problem?”

The man in the gray suit did not look at him. His gaze stayed on Renata. Then, slowly, he turned to Paul.

“Watch your woman,” he said in a low voice.

Renata’s breath tightened. She felt the catch in her throat. Her fingers curled, instinctively hiding her hands and arms. Her pulse raced.

Paul stood between them without thinking.

“You watch YOUR self,” he said.

The man’s expression did not change, but Renata felt a flicker of recognition pass between them. The recognition of someone you don’t want to remember. He nodded once, as if finishing a private calculation.

“Lo siento, señorita.”

He adjusted his French cuffs, glanced at Paul, and added with polite insult, “Hasta luego, gringo.”

Then he slipped into the moving night as if the city had been saving space for him. For a moment, neither spoke. Renata stood very still, trying to breathe quietly.

Paul turned to her. “Hey, you okay?”

She nodded too quickly. “Yes. He startled me, that’s all.”

But the smile she gave him was wrong. It was a smile for strangers, not for Paul.

“Okay,” he said, giving her space. “Want to sit a while?”

“Si. Just a minute.”

Paul sat, eyes still on the street where the man had vanished. Renata looked down at the melting ice in her glass. Each of them had retreated into their own worlds of worry. There was only the faintest ripple in the air that hinted that something had shifted. But under Renata’s blouse, her bruise pulsed again, as if remembering what happened before she did.

those flowers in the vase are fading

they were once full of intentional beauty
a greeting that made you feel immortal

they don’t stand so straight
their heads droop here and there
the smell of the decay of green matter
takes over as they fold in on themselves
leaving behind what was
and what will never be again.

It felt as if everyone there was running from something or toward themselves. Some hid. Some healed. Some lost days in the sun and did not care where they landed. Renata understood that kind of life. For the first time, she was aligned with herself. In La Paz, she could decide who she was, and no one corrected her.

She shed the combat uniforms she had worn in Argentina. Her clothes now had movement, soft fabric that swayed when the warm wind blew in from the Sea of Cortez. Her Stevie Nicks whimsy goth style softened into lighter colours. The combat boots gave way to espadrilles and huarache sandals.

Her brown hair was longer, curling in the humid air. Most days, it blew across her face while she poured cervezas for the regulars at the crooked seaside shack that had taken her in. Room and board if you worked two shifts between the bar and the kitchen.

So she bussed tables and met Eduardo, the cook who seemed part man and part sea, a quiet elder made of salt, stories and early morning light.

Each morning, he set a bucket of Cabrilla in front of her and showed her how to slit each one open, pull out the guts, and scrape away the fine scales until the fish glistened and her wrists tattood by the sparkling scales. Then they chopped vegetables side by side for the tacos they made fresh every day, pausing between sips of the black coffee Eduardo brewed in his tiny stovetop espresso pot. She stepped quietly into his tidal rhythm and had never felt more alive.

Years later, in Mexico City, the smell of coffee would make her stomach turn. By the time Paul would leave for his studio in the mornings, she would stand at the sink staring at the bruise on her arm until the water ran cold.

For all the light she found in the seaside shack with its drifters, tacos, knives, and lemons, Renata’s fire for justice burned just as fiercely. Mexico had not caught up to even Argentina’s tentative steps towards women’s security. On her arrival in the sleepy beach town, she joined a group of activists working to draw attention to the violence against women. Even six years after the earthquake in Mexico City and the fall of the PNR, women like Renata were not safe.

She worked at night, on rotating shifts, in the living rooms of women whose husbands were already asleep after long days of fishing. She made posters. She knocked on select doors for donations. She waited in the back of the pharmacy to use the single fax machine, feeding one page at a time through the rollers until the last flyer cleared.

For Renata, four months after leaving Argentina with no forwarding address, this was still freedom. At times, she wondered why no one had come looking for her. At other,s she was sure her father knew exactly where she was. Sometimes she imagined she saw him standing across the parking lot, in the strip where sand gave way to gravel. She would drop her head and pretend to be busy.

When she finally glanced up, there was never anyone there, only a shadow that didn’t match the light. She pressed her thumb into a line of condensation on freshly poured cerveza and watched it bead.

Argentina cast a long shadow for Renata.

But her instincts were not wrong; they were only obfuscated by her stubborn nature. Her father had come looking for her, first by proxy and then in person.

He watched her from a distance. The way she moved through the shack with a smile he had not seen since she was five, and she had been given that old, worn-out compass. Her dress blowing in the gentle wind, the pencil that kept slipping from behind her ear as she spoke to customers and the sound of her animated laugh as the winds carried it to his ears. The innocence and freedom that settled on her like the light in a Rembrandt.

His heart was heavy. He knew she was happy. His presence would only bring the kind of cloud that sits on an embankment waiting to release its liquid.

He took a long drag on his cigarette, tossed it into the sand and returned to his car before she could look up again.

Something behind her murmured, a voice maybe? A shadow that didn’t match the light. Renata turned. Only the breeze moved. Unsettled but not frightened, she returned to her customers.

One afternoon after a rally, Renata sat at the crooked seaside shack where the tables shifted in the sand. The air tasted like salt. She pressed her thumb into a line of condensation on her glass and watched it bead.

It was there she first laid eyes on Paul Woodruff.

He walked in as if he had stepped out of another life, intentionally into hers. Neither of them knew what that first meeting would hold until it was too late.

“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

From the time she was a young girl, Renata knew she didn’t fit neatly into the world. She could never understand why the things that made other girls happy felt insignificant and uninteresting to her. She was supposed to play with dolls, yet she wanted to take her grandfather’s old compass and pretend she was on a great adventure in Patagonia. Instead, she used it to wander the long corridors of her family’s mansion in Buenos Aires, tracing invisible lines of rivers and mountains across polished floors, mapping a world that existed only in her mind.

Renata’s place in Argentine society had been secured at birth. She was the only daughter of the infamous industrialist Maximilian Costantini. Shipping, pharmaceuticals and other activities not listed on the books. The Costantini name carried decades of quiet controversy, the kind people avoided mentioning in polite company. Her grandmother, Liliana Rohan, had married into the family from a wealthy French line and spent her early years trying to wash away stains no one dared name.

From early on, Renata moved through the world with a restless intensity that unsettled everyone around her. She was impulsive and precocious, uncontrollable and hungry for something she could not yet name. She read emotions faster than adults, questioned everything, and pushed back even harder. She tried on ideas like armour. She raged against her father’s world without fully understanding how it worked, and with every year she felt less like a daughter and more like an intruder in her own house.

Liliana raised Renata until her death. Renata’s mother had died under mysterious circumstances when Renata was five, and by the time she reached adolescence, she was essentially being raised by an absent father and an exasperated, disinterested household staff.

By her early teens, she was already on the outs with just about everyone in her life and made it clear she would never go along simply because everyone else did. When her grandmother teased her for always being angry at someone, Renata corrected her, saying no, she was only disappointed.

In high school, Renata channelled most of her energy into agitating her father and anyone who moved through his orbit. She found injustice everywhere she looked. Violence against women, the bias that kept women from inheriting or governing their own bodies, the quiet compliance of the working class and the exploitation of indigenous people. She could not stomach the stench, as she put it, of murderers Europe who had fled with blood on their hands and gold in their pockets.

Renata wore her dark hair in a short pixie bob and dressed as if preparing for combat in army fatigues, punk rock t-shirts under a vintage leather jacket. The clothes swallowed her petite frame, but they couldn’t hide her beauty. There was something soft about Renata despite the armour because behind her bright blue eyes lived a longing to be carefree.

As Argentina shifted, Renata shifted with it. The dictatorship had ended, democracy slowly returned and long-silenced movements stepped back into the public eye. It was the slow unravelling of fear and silence that fed her sense that the world did not have to stay as it was. The decade also held a pulse of hope. Feminism gained strength and entered the national narrative. Divorce had been legalized, and joint custody reforms were reshaping the lives of women and children across the country.

By her late teens, the rebellion of her childhood had hardened into conviction. Renata became fiercely political, emotionally volatile, idealistic and dangerously sure of herself. She was still young enough to dive into life headfirst but old enough to understand there would be consequences. She did not heed the latter.

At a forum during the UN Decade for Women in Latin America, she met members of Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the human rights group that had confronted the regime and fought for the rights of women and children. Something inside her caught fire. It would be fair to say she did not hold back among these women, and it would also be fair to say she had never learned restraint. For all her hatred of her privilege, she still behaved like her father. When she wanted something, she moved toward it without thinking about the cost.

By the time she turned 21, the contradictions in her life had become incompatible. One foot in her father’s world, the other grasping for the world she wanted. What had once been teenage rebellion was now sharpened into something that would change her fate. She no longer wanted to fight from inside the gilded walls of her father’s home.

After a late-night meeting with a few of the most ardent members of the group, Renata had whipped herself into a frenzy. It was the kind of internal tempest that came from a naive mix of youthful certainty and long-held resentment, a conflation of the country’s injustices with her own shame of the society that had raised her. She had reached the end of what she could tolerate.

That night, she returned to the marble and stone that had been her prison, packed a small bag, and left a note for her father. She never slept so peacefully. She awoke before the house stirred, and in the fall of 1990, she slipped out of her old life. By the spring of 1991, she was in La Paz, living under the Baja California sun. She threw herself into helping Mexican women claim the freedom she believed she had finally won.

The sun streams in on a worn, yellow Formica table. City noises drift through the window into the apartment: the sound of a buzzing scooter, dishes clanking, two men arguing over a delivery. A small refrigerator buzzes and thuds in the corner. It’s covered with photographs of faces looking at the viewer, random newspaper clippings, and refrigerator magnets from cities around the world.

Paul Woodruff sips his coffee with the morning sun hitting his unshaven face. He glances at a bamboo-framed photo of a younger version of himself and his girlfriend, Renata, on a beach in La Paz.

He shifts his gaze back to the photographs he’s taken on the table and to the ones on their tiny, dented fridge; each is a small truth with the power to change everything, but is eroded by the passing of time.

Paul glances at the photographs on the fridge, La Paz before all the noise. He smiles and takes a virtual trip down memory lane to the first time he saw Renata at the beachside cafe in the same light he is daydreaming in now.

The sea behind them, the sky was so bright it blurred the edges of her hair. He still remembers the way she looked at him that first day, half-daring him to speak.

A soft sound from the back of the apartment brings him back to the yellow table. He knows she’s been roused from her sleep.

“Are you going to drink this coffee with me?” he nonchalantly says, looking back at the table.

Still in sleep mode, Renata shuffles into the room, yawning, her tousled pixie rocking a serious bed head. The light from the window streams past her, creating a silhouette of her body through her pale yellow robe. She lets her hand linger on Paul’s shoulder as she walks past him.

“How can I pass up one of Paul Hinton’s famous Detroit coffees? They’re da bomb, no?” teased Renata.

Paul loved how certain words floated out of her mouth — the faint lilt of Buenos Aires clinging to her English.

“Had I known this five years ago when you played that ‘I’m a badass bitch don’t even try to talk to me’ card, I would have brought you a cup of coffee instead of tequila,” said Paul.

“Oh, mi amor, it would have always taken tequila to get me to talk to you,” said Renata, smiling.

As she settles into their cozy table talk, Paul asks Renata about her protest the night before.

Renata sips her coffee, as if biting her tongue to hide something, and tells him it was flawless. She talks faster, to speed up through the parts she doesn’t want Paul to focus on: that some of the protestors were threatened by a group of armed men.

As Renata softens the story for Paul, the real night flickers behind her eyes — her friends at a peaceful protest, signs reading “stop gender-based violence,” “no mas,” “víctimas de feminicidio,” struck down by batons and metal pipes.

She shivers at the memory of her argument with a well-dressed man who violently shoved her into two men from the Policía Federal Ministerial.

Paul is visibly relieved by Renata’s story.

“Good. I was worried it would turn ugly. I heard rumblings that some guys might make trouble,” Paul says, relieved.

Renata gets them more coffee. With her back turned towards him, she calls back, “Well, you were wrong, there was no trouble.”

As Renata reaches for the coffee, her robe slips off her shoulder, revealing a bruise on her right forearm, which she quickly covers.

“It’s macho stuff, the march next week will be A-okay, isn’t that how you say it?” laughs Renata, nervously.

Paul comes over to Renata, puts his arms around her waist and kisses her.

“Yes, that’s just how I say it. Anyway, since I’m such a tough, macho guy, I can knock them out with my good looks and my menacing white-belt jiu-jitsu.”

He backs away from Renata, flexing exactly zero muscles, his mock jiu-jitsu chop as uncoordinated as ever.

“Now, why don’t we start this morning over in bed?” Paul says.

Paul and Renata passionately and playfully kiss as he walks her back into the bedroom, her robe falling to the floor.

Outside, a scooter backfires in the street — a sharp crack that makes her flinch before she hides it with a laugh. Neither of them notices the bruise on her neck darkening to violet in the morning light.

A slender man in a red baseball cap sits pensively with his hand on a camera. His fingers restlessly move across to the front of the camera and generally settle on the shutter button. Another man, shaped like a GI Joe action figure, is dressed in army fatigues. His hair fops around his face, matched only by his wry smile. A third man with a generous frame leans into the bar with a white dish towel thrown over his shoulder, munching on a Chupa Chup.

A teenage girl is half-heartedly sweeping the floor, looking longingly out of the open door to the busy street.

She’s more mature than her years and unaware of her beauty. She straightens her red and pink dotted blouse and runs one hand through her golden brown hair. She looks over her shoulder at the three men talking with each other, turns back to the doorway, and begins to tell a story to a shadow who has chosen not to enter the bar.

“I heard this story once about this American photographer who was kidnapped by a Mexican cartel.”

She holds a slow blink. She sees a man being beaten as several others stand around in tailored suits. A woman is slumped in the corner.

The girl snaps her eyes closed and shakes her head to keep the memory away.

“They drugged him with a dirty needle and then beat the crap out of him for three days. Then, they just turned him loose. He wandered the streets of Mexico City with blood all over him, pissed off because he didn’t have his camera with him. The camera was the first thing they took after they grabbed him from his shitty little apartment. He talked to someone at the American embassy, and they said he should go back to America. He didn’t know where to go or what to do. He had money and no camera. The camera was his lifeline.”

“He was a photographer. He took photos of people the world doesn’t care about. Hookers, drug dealers, street gangs, kids pushing street carts bigger than themselves with no shoes. He sees them.”

“He doesn’t drag them into a studio, he just becomes them in their bars, streets, beds and an occasional half-burned chair tossed with clumsy precision into the street. The people in his photographs look through him to us. They proudly tell us who they are. They know we’re scared of them. But we can’t look away. He sees himself in them. He feels safe. Happy. Connected.”

Her voice becomes softer, and her cadence slows. She looks into the street, past the shadow, feeling time slow. She sees their eyes and faces, strewn with pain, worry and fatigue at the hand they have been given in life.

They look past her to someone taking their photo; she knows he sees them and has given them the gift of being seen.

“I heard he hid out for a while after he was kidnapped, but just ended up drinking all of Mexico City every night. He still took photos. They were his reason for being alive, his redemption, his only drug. The photos and his camera were the only things that made him feel real.”

“One night, he met a 16-year-old hooker-in-waiting, they say. She always wore a hot pink tank top with blue jean short-shorts and purple Adidas flip flops. She had clever green eyes. She never braided her hair. She liked it messy. She gave him a ride home one night on her rusted mint-green scooter after another night of watching him drink all of Mexico City. She told him he scared her; he told her he was the one who should be afraid since she was running every red light in Mexico City at 2 am.”

Something was on the handlebars. A cross? An animal? Yes, was that a handmade stuffed giraffe duct taped to the handlebars? He held onto the seat, his eyes closed tightly as they sped through the city. He felt the warm, dusty air on his face and in his eyes. He didn’t care; it felt good, and he was not dead yet.

“She told him she wanted him to be her only client so she wouldn’t have to sell herself to strangers. He said he didn’t get involved, but would pay to take her photo. She said that it didn’t feel like work to take a photo of someone.”

“She asked him if he thought people would pay for rides home from bars if they were too drunk. He said yes. She told him that it felt like honest work. She left him there in his new shitty apartment so drunk he could barely stand up. He never saw her again after that.”

He gets off the scooter and stumbles into his apartment. As he puts the key in the door, he looks back over his shoulder and sees the girl with the green eyes speeding away, her hair trailing behind her like a plume of algae trailing a ship. The giraffe bobbed, teetering back and forth, as she disappeared into the blackened, dusty streets.

“A few months later, he went back to that local bar where he saw the girl. He asked about her. The bartender told him the girl had moved to La Condesa and was selling tamales from her rusted mint-green scooter and giving drunk Americans rides back to their hotels.”

“I heard she wears her hair in a braid now.”

He looked for her after he sobered up. Every girl with a braid made him wonder if it was her. He caught a glimpse of a girl with a red ribbon in her braid and what looked like an animal on the handlebars, but she faded into the street, lost in a crowded street of faces that looked past him.

“I don’t know if this is a true story, but everyone says it is. I’d like to think it is.”

Come on in. But don’t expect this story to behave the way stories usually do.

This one is written from the fractured space between witness and storyteller — the space where memory, trauma and imagination overlap. To me, it’s a kind of emotional architecture, a way for two truths to inhabit the same space without collapsing into one voice, or without resolution. Everyone always wants a resolution, but sometimes no resolution is the solution.

If it feels unfamiliar as you read, that’s good. You’re meant to feel it more than define it. These first two characters aren’t just recounting events; they’re remembering them through someone else’s lens. I call it empathy as a medium.

If it feels haunting, maybe that’s because both characters are haunted: she by what she’s heard or sensed, and he by what he’s lost and wants to remember.

In an unconventional way, this story isn’t about what happened, but about how memory and witness can share a single moment. Sometimes the one who lived it and the one who remembers it aren’t the same person anymore.

Adapted from the screenplay and rooted in the short story 18 Minutes, Strands follows Paul Woodruff, a photographer kidnapped by a Mexican cartel. After years trying to outrun the past, he returns to Mexico and meets Camile, a street-savvy teenage girl with no past. Through their uneasy friendship, Paul and Camile discover that their lives are mysteriously connected through brutality, sacrifice and love.

This story has been a long time coming and it has followed and haunted me for years, finally finding its way home. 18 Minutes was first published in Deluge in a Paper Cup in 2021, and since then, it has taken a winding road from short story to screenplay and back to fiction. It is based on a true story told to me by a photographer who lived in Mexico City when he was kidnapped and brutalized. His memories of that time, his photography and the people who crossed his path have stayed with him through the memories of the assault and his healing.

The original short story carries a hybrid voice of both witness and storyteller. The serialized novel keeps that ethos alive, hovering between journalist and filmmaker, written with stripped-down realism and the current of documentary intimacy. Strands moves between photographic realism and a psychological echo. It is deeply human and I hope it makes you want to live inside the aftermath of Paul’s trauma and healing, and perhaps find the love that can live inside sacrifice.

Each chapter of Strands will be released here on Substack as part of this serialized novel.

18 minutes

(published in the 2021 Chapbook, Deluge in a Paper Cup)

I wanted to make an 18-minute short film

about a guy who was kidnapped

by the Mexican cartel.

He was pistol-whipped for three days,

watched his friend get gang-raped,

was drugged with a dirty needle

while they beat the crap out of him.

Then, they just turned him loose.

He wandered the streets of Ciudad Juárez with blood all over him,

pissed off because he didn’t have his camera with him.

That was the first thing they took after they grabbed him

from his shitty little apartment with one bed, a round table and a chair.

He talked to the FBI.

They said he couldn’t go back to Ciudad Juárez.

He didn’t know where to go.

He had no money and no camera.

The camera was his lifeline.

He was a photographer.

He took photos of people the world doesn’t care about.

Hookers, drug dealers, street gangs,

kids pushing street carts bigger than themselves with no shoes.

He sees them.

He doesn’t drag them into a studio,

he just becomes them in their bars, streets, beds and an occasional half-burned chair

tossed with clumsy precision into the street.

The people in his photographs look through him to us.

They proudly tell us who they are.

They know we’re scared of them.

We can’t look away.

He sees himself in them.

He feels safe.

Happy.

Connected.

It’s a far cry from a kid born in Santa Monica

and raised in the icy tundra of Detroit.

He went to Guatemala after he was kidnapped.

He drank all of Guatemala City.

He didn’t teach photography anymore, but he still took photos.

They were his lifeline.

His only drug.

The one thing that made him feel real.

He met a 15-year-old hooker-in-waiting named Marta.

She took him home one night on her rusted mint-green Vespa

after another night of drinking all of Guatemala City.

She wore a hot pink tank top with blue jean short shorts

and purple flip flops that said Adidas on the side.

She never braided her hair. She liked it messy.

She told him he scared her.

This was ironic to him because, as she told him,

he was clinging to her tiny waist for dear life

as she ran every red light in Guatemala City at 2 am.

She said she wanted him to be her only job

so she wouldn’t have to be a hooker.

He said he didn’t get involved with his subjects

but would pay her to take her photo.

She said that didn’t feel like work to her.

She left him there in his new shitty apartment in Guatemala City

so drunk he could barely stand up.

She texted him the next day and asked again

if he would be her only client.

He still said no.

She asked him if he thought people would pay for rides home from the bar

if they were too drunk.

He said yes.

She felt like that was honest work.

He never saw her again after that.

A few months later, Kiki the bartender

told him Marta had moved across town to the tourist areas

and was giving drunk Americans rides home on her mint-green scooter.

She wore her hair in a braid now.

I never made this film. But I wanted to.

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a pen that doesn’t write
paper that holds no words
the sky is not blue
it’s colored red and orange by the sinking sun that doesn’t sink
do we know what we see?
can we understand what’s not there?
a raging river carries us nowhere
but it knows our journey
onward, forward
a maelstrom of past, present and future
it consumes as it continues
while you float out to sea.

I’ve slipped the noose more than a dozen times to land on my feet and find I forgot what put me there in the first place. I’ve spent my life running through Escher paintings looking for a new frame to exist and finding myself back in the same frame I started. Staircase and window. Balcony and mezzanine. Loggia and portico. All crumbling, shifting and standing still at the same time. Chaos and order. Logic and disbelief. Suspended in time, knowing there is no time. Defined by space that folds in on itself, measured in angles and geometry so magnificent our minds refuse to see the corners, which provide a refuge from the world around us. I fold myself into a staircase that turns into a balcony that dissapates into the white space around me. Peace at last, short-lived by the hands of time, preserved forever by my will.

Should I just let my emotions sit where they want to?

A big comfy chair, a bistro table, maybe in the middle of the street letting all my emotions run wild on N Edgefield Avenue.

No one would notice.
And if they did, they wouldn’t know what to say.

It’s okay.

Because in this moment
I am pulled in a direction of what I should be
need to be and want to be.

But I know I haven’t done what I needed to do
to be any of those things.

Is it my time?
Was it ever my time?

I sit at a long wooden farm table where people I don’t know used to sit.
The table is marked by one hundred years of conversations, arguments, laughter, hot kettles and water pitchers that have left their mark on the soft wood.

A table for eight now seats one.

I listen to Max Richter’s Vivaldi Spring 1 - 2012 as loudly as I can.
I cry at the first violin, dragged into myself with no purchase.

Falling,
falling,
falling through the darkness, looking at the light above me fade away.

My hands clasp my face.
I feel everything and everyone rushing to meet me
the past, the present, the future
the things that haven’t happened
and the things that may never be.

My body shakes.
The violins build.
The staccato of this musical composition keeps pace with my tears.

I open my eyes to see the faces of people I know
sitting at each chair around the table.

They’re all dead now
But their presence is palpable.

A man I loved with a nod to let me know it will be okay.

My grandmother and grandfather bringing their love to bear.
Smiling, she extends her hand to rest on mine, and in her hand I see the wrinkles of time from her life and the warmth of her heart merges into mine.

My best friend taken from me at 16, cutting short our dreams of extending ourselves into the world, smirking as he always did in the face of the impossible.

And my beagle Henry, sitting as he once did next to me with a knowing far beyond most humans I encounter today.

The tears stop.
It’s a moment. A beat.

I think I just ache for something that I can’t reach or touch.
It’s hard to say.

That’s more accurate, I just can’t say.

I know that at some point in time
when I am gone
maybe someone I know will sit at this table
and know I am smiling back at them.

Maybe.

i am watching a robin play in the fountain

it's oblivious to the bees having a midday drink from the top of the fibonacci fountain head

it jumps in

it jumps out

it flaps its wings

it sits in the water

it euphorically shimmies and shakes the water from its feathers

the bees still buzz about, landing and taking off again

unphased by the bird having a bath beneath them

the sinking sun and the sea

they are perpetually on a collision course to meet their end
together and separately

one descends into the water
the other ripples with false hope

they never collide

together, they are grander than all of us

hypnotic

the fat molton golden orb lures us in like a siren to sailors at sea

to the brink of a promise
in the hope it will begin again

I think you are drugged by your own lies
maybe it’s because you don’t want to see the truth
but I see it in your eyes

in the way you dart from thought
to deed to your abject justification
of why you do the things you do

you know
those things

those salacious things
they are choices you make because something is missing

you already know this
you probably feel okay

but you are sinking to the bottom of Ophelia’s water
your unconscious mind trapping you
like a snapped willow branch

don’t worry
you will rise back to the top
your lungs emptied of air will still bring you to the surface
and you will begin again

because we lived in a gelatinous tidal pool for nine months

you breathe water
you feed through a tube

there are no instructions
no one tells you

but you know what to do
it’s primal

you emerge into the light
gravity assaults you
air chokes you

fear becomes survival
you gasp
you scream
your entrance is violent

you don’t remember this, do you?
your life begins in violence
and you don’t remember anything

don’t worry
it’s not your fault

you are programmed not to remember how you got here
but you are programmed to remember the choices that led you to the place
you don’t want to be

you keep fighting yourself
when you don’t need to

life will do that for you

you already know what to do
cede to your biology
to your primal programming

breathe in the life you want.

My mind is a mess.

It’s chaotic.

Fickle.

Frenzied.

It’s potted shrimp.

It won’t unpack itself, it won’t reset.

It’s in a loop of why and why not.

A pair of dueling algorithms fighting in a sudden death match for control of my soul.

Behavior.

Way of being

It’s whistles a tune it doesn’t know

And expects me to know it.

It creates anger

then doubt

then sadness

then it starts over again.

Write don’t write.

Be don’t be.

I missed my stop.

Or did I?

I can’t see what’s real

And feel what I see.

It’s decades of messes compressed into a perfectly layered terrine of my life.

And I don’t have a spoon.

sit down

sit the fuck down

stop squirming

stop shifting, sifting, stirring

it seems all I do is shift, sift and stir

sometimes the stillness stirs it all up

sometimes I am only still when I’m stirred up

write when you’re happy

angry

silent

and there it is again

the silence

stirring up the seemingly salient parts of me

I’m not congress with myself

stilted

I’m my own brief accord

slivered into pieces I can see in the stillness,

the silence.