My Cardboard Balcony

Needle Road by Belinda Roddie There's a needle road I take back home, slick and silver, next to the lasso lane, the coil of asphalt slapping automobile hooves as they trot away from a long commute. On the tip, a taquería smells of carnitas and cayenne pepper, the hot chocolate spicy, the mariachi band trembling in their braided charro tapestries, breathing in the cold autumn with plucked strings and hot air in horns elevated to the cloudy heavens. When the tires on my truck hit the curb just right, it is almost as if I am the thread in the eye, a string looped around the chromed tesserae of the mosaic neighborhood - an idolized mesh of fabric and stone, woven and sewn to create a flow, a continual line that drapes over the lip of the needle road and doesn't even end around the simple, stabbing point.

Daddy bought Leslie a new piano, and it played a tune so flat that I could feel the floor level out beneath me as the notes pounded it. Flat, flat, flat. Leslie played it every day, though, and once Daddy hired a guy to retune the thing, suddenly the garish phrases became fairly elegant melodies. Leslie played piano until the day she died. A week before she succumbed to leukemia, she played for the entire country with the New York Philharmonic. Everyone applauded, whether on theater seats or couches at home. I cried. And when Leslie smiled, her teeth were perfectly flat.