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André Naffis-Sahely The Bond for Stacy Hardy The dry August air reeks of wood and ash and the smoke plumes leaving the rocky bowl of the San Gabriels sink to kiss the lawn. The dogs bark themselves hoarse, their frightened black throats as charred as the wounded hillsides. No refuge for coyotes, raccoons, or the striped skunk, as they scatter like sparks from a camper’s hearth. What is power if not the ability to dislodge the living from their synchronous groove? After six months of death and disease, the rabbits stir from their nests in the crevices of rusty engines and people finally begin to mourn. On Verdugo, a cardboard placard stapled to a half-stripped tree, reads: ‘Goodbye, Emilio’, or, as the newspapers called him, John Doe #283, but nobody’s heart’s large enough to hold all the names of the fallen. On either side of the boulevard, a slew of recession-raptured businesses: 8
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André Naffis-Sahely| The Bond ‘to let’, ‘for lease’, ‘pray for us’ – and even the sign above the gun-store, ARMED & DANGEROUS says ‘we’re through’. Today, my distant friend, I’ve only room for questions. What does endurance mean if it appears to be endless, what is grass if not gunpowder, what is this chain of encampments and shanties hugging the freeway if not humanity’s take on the Great Barrier Reef, each person a polyp on the coral of concrete? I think of you in Cairo and your imprisoned comrades, another tinderbox awaiting the flint-stone of hurt… It is late at night, so let every word draw blood: everything is not going to be all right. All my life, an unbroken string of departures, a litany of leaving, but here and there, faint glimmers of meaningful connections, including you, my sister from another mother, another father, another world. Perhaps we shall soon meet again, perhaps not, perhaps the flowers stuffed into the beaked masks of plague doctors provided more comfort than safety, perhaps not, but what gives us solace 9

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André Naffis-Sahely

The Bond for Stacy Hardy

The dry August air reeks of wood and ash and the smoke plumes leaving the rocky bowl of the San Gabriels sink to kiss the lawn.

The dogs bark themselves hoarse, their frightened black throats as charred as the wounded hillsides. No refuge for coyotes, raccoons, or the striped skunk,

as they scatter like sparks from a camper’s hearth. What is power if not the ability to dislodge the living from their synchronous groove? After six months of death and disease, the rabbits stir from their nests in the crevices of rusty engines and people finally begin to mourn.

On Verdugo, a cardboard placard stapled to a half-stripped tree, reads: ‘Goodbye, Emilio’, or, as the newspapers called him, John Doe #283,

but nobody’s heart’s large enough to hold all the names of the fallen. On either side of the boulevard, a slew of recession-raptured businesses:

8

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