My brother Johnny and I have been driving three days, left San Diego on a whim in this kind-of stolen car. The BMW belongs to Ryan, Johnny’s boyfriend, this older, very tanned, very rich guy Johnny’s been living with for ten months.

Sisyphus Writes in His Diary

Never mind me, I was sentenced to this. It’s the boulder I don’t understand.

My grandmother was very old. Her hair was white as bone, and her bones were thin as stems of feathers. She sat in her rocking chair with the bright green window open behind her, and the dim, dusty room of varnished wood and books and photographs before her.

I do believe my mother loved me. She’d invested our Grünenthal settlement money well and lived frugally herself so I’d have enough after her death, and with my inheritance I was able to buy a house—a foreclosed home in a leafy town not far from the city.

Down in the tail of the parish, where the bayou emptied all its secrets, I grew certain my grandfather lurked, waiting for me to find him. Since I’d only met him once before he disappeared, the odds were long that I’d ever catch his scent or follow his trail. Yet by thirteen, I was hell-bent to try.

I’d started swabbing decks for Ken Jacobs at the beginning of the summer. I’d moved on to teak work by June, but that was really just a fancy kind of cleaning. Eventually I was allowed to take on the general work of the boatyard and was making eleven dollars an hour for it, which was two more than what I’d started at.

I. Where You Belong

My aunts had made me empanadas for the plane trip, wrapped in waxed paper and nestled into my bag along with what my mother had called the family teeth: tiny white stones gathered as she walked on beaches in Brazil and Uruguay with my father.

Excerpted from Schoolhouse: Lessons on Love & Landscape, a memoir forthcoming from Ice Cube Press in October 2016.

Sometimes it is like a dream. A sleepwalking. The way you move through your surroundings—through doorways, backyards, decades—one unconscious foot following the other. Perhaps for a moment you’re able to focus on a color or sound or even a face, yet before you can name it, it passes.

The lessons come in the mail. Packages like gifts. When opened, there are capacitors, transistor sockets, and circuit board connectors, neatly arranged along with the assembly manuals. These my father will carefully follow, filling in the question-and-answer sections in his cramped script.

Claudia Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Nothing in Nature Is Private (1994), The End of the Alphabet (1998), PLOT (2001), and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004).

Later that day, after we find out about the adhesions in my uterus, I see the summer’s first fireflies. My husband and I sit on the front porch while the dog sniffs the perimeter of a flowerbed. And there, in a thicket of shadow along our neighbor’s fence, small sparks of green in the dusk.

1. Choose flowers that still have enough life left in them to make it through the service. Many florists will tell you that funerals are the perfect opportunity to purge the cooler of older flowers. While it is true that the funeral service only lasts a few hours, the worst call you can get as a florist comes from an outraged family member, because the $300 spray they ordered wilted. The whole point of putting up a bunch of flowers at funerals is to distract from death, not remind everyone of it.

Aleatory:

as in aleatory

dance moves,

For Darrel Alejandro Holnes

The motorcycle I ride only turns left
When you go west I have to bear right
Such balance is not my forte
I’d rather bait

I don’t know why I close my eyes and lace

my fingers like the seam of a baseball just

to whisper between dark palms what I have

Waterhouse, 1903

Don’t you know it’s useless, dipping your head in

greed like the blonde daffodils, a cluster

of eager, yellow tongues? I thought you

better than base desires; like you, I dreamt

who knows what makes

me who knows

if that makes me anything

but I know

Forbidden the shotgun, my father

tried to kill the wounded deer with a crossbow,

and then the shovel he asked me to fetch

from the shed. Grass stiffened to spikes

Her name has the sea in it.

And the word for sailor.

It could’ve been a cloud, a precious stone,

the chaotic skywriting of the flock.

First I pass the man having a morning smoke,

his cart filled with ripe melons.

Then a woman with her pyramids

of summer peaches.