Essays
Memories of a Chicana Falsa - Los Angeles Review of Books
MICHELE SERROS WROTE for the same reasons many of us write — to share stories, to tell jokes, to tackle issues, to make a living. But, on top of all that, or maybe even before all of it, I believe she wrote to know people. She would prank call her friends, make them underwear with Tom Jones lyrics on it, write them messages in the dust on their cars, doll them up in quinceañera dresses for a poetry reading, laugh and laugh with them and send them her stories and tell them to go write their own. And she treated her readers with the same kind of playful goodwill.
“She was the same person to everybody. Only one Michele. Thousands of others,” her good friend the poet Joseph Rios said recently. Once you knew Michele, she held on to you, and it was a good hold.
“She was the same person to everybody. Only one Michele. Thousands of others,” her good friend the poet Joseph Rios said recently. Once you knew Michele, she held on to you, and it was a good hold.
A Promise in Permanent Ink - Los Angeles Times
We had sort of talked about this before, in circles, in theory. Things like, if we were to get married, we’d do it like this. But we always left it at that. I grew up with a counterculture mind-set that marriage was patriarchal and heterosexist, and I always figured happiness came from not committing, from bucking the system.
But when it came up for real, things felt different. The coy invitation, the mischievous smile I’d come to know, the people buzzing in the warm night. Nothing was more important to us than family, so what if we became each other’s family? It didn’t feel like a step some outside force was telling us to take -- like the degree program, the better job, the more expensive house -- that may or may not make us happy.
But when it came up for real, things felt different. The coy invitation, the mischievous smile I’d come to know, the people buzzing in the warm night. Nothing was more important to us than family, so what if we became each other’s family? It didn’t feel like a step some outside force was telling us to take -- like the degree program, the better job, the more expensive house -- that may or may not make us happy.
Alamo Cemetery, Contra Costa County - California Northern
Covering a wall in the entryway of the Museum of the San Ramon Valley is a map of the land from 1885. I locate the name Hall, and find a picture of my great-great-grandfather Myron standing with the San Ramon Valley Pioneers, all members heavily bearded and holding ranchers’ hats. In the museum’s library, I learn that the indigenous people living on the land, named Tatcan by the Spanish, were some of the most defiant in their opposition to the Western colonists. Half a century after the Tatcan lost control of their land when the San Ramon Valley Pioneers established farms and businesses in the region, a mere twenty Native Americans were listed in the Alamo and Lafayette post office areas.
I look closely at the picture of my great-great-grandfather, a self-made man, a botany-enthusiast who prioritized discovery over profit, and wonder how much he understood about the history of this land, and how he came to possess it. Later, a docent tells me that the remains of three Indian villages were unearthed as Highway 680 was being built past Alamo in 1962. A burial site, estimated to be nearly 4,500 years old, stands only a few miles from our 150-year old Hall family plot, a reminder that the history of this land reaches much farther back than the five generations our family has been rooted here.
I look closely at the picture of my great-great-grandfather, a self-made man, a botany-enthusiast who prioritized discovery over profit, and wonder how much he understood about the history of this land, and how he came to possess it. Later, a docent tells me that the remains of three Indian villages were unearthed as Highway 680 was being built past Alamo in 1962. A burial site, estimated to be nearly 4,500 years old, stands only a few miles from our 150-year old Hall family plot, a reminder that the history of this land reaches much farther back than the five generations our family has been rooted here.
Karma at the Colombo Airport - Leave the Lipstick, Take the Iguana (Travelers' Tales)
It was all too clear, when I came down with a violent, upwardly mobile stomach bug on my last day in South Asia, that I had accrued some seriously bad karma.
My episode of feet-slapping, stomach-buckling sprints to the bathroom, cloaked in midnight steam room heat of our Colombo apartment, began just hours before our flight back to Los Angeles, after seven weeks in Sri Lanka—on the one day we didn’t eat street food but splurged on a beachfront fancy restaurant with a Frenchy name. The chances that this food on this day would make me sick were too absurd.
Besides, we were in a country of tens of thousands of Buddha statues, in which saffron-clad monks are the highest-class rank, and everything happens for a reason.
Halfway through the trip, my partner, Aruna, who is Sri Lankan by blood and literally begins to glow after a few weeks in the heat and humidity, got laid up for three days in Colombo with his own nasty, delirium-inducing stomach bacteria. After he recovered, I trilled on about having a stomach of steel and being safe from all manner of invasive critters because I was a vegetarian.
My episode of feet-slapping, stomach-buckling sprints to the bathroom, cloaked in midnight steam room heat of our Colombo apartment, began just hours before our flight back to Los Angeles, after seven weeks in Sri Lanka—on the one day we didn’t eat street food but splurged on a beachfront fancy restaurant with a Frenchy name. The chances that this food on this day would make me sick were too absurd.
Besides, we were in a country of tens of thousands of Buddha statues, in which saffron-clad monks are the highest-class rank, and everything happens for a reason.
Halfway through the trip, my partner, Aruna, who is Sri Lankan by blood and literally begins to glow after a few weeks in the heat and humidity, got laid up for three days in Colombo with his own nasty, delirium-inducing stomach bacteria. After he recovered, I trilled on about having a stomach of steel and being safe from all manner of invasive critters because I was a vegetarian.
Once, In New York - American Literary Review
The second plane must have come from the south or the west. From our building half a mile northeast, all we saw was another ball of fire.
There was a thunderous clap. We three, Sarah, Jeanne and I, stood before the window. Sarah filmed. The camera she had gotten for Christmas last year. Its first videos of us smoking pot and talking about French Fries.
I spilled the Lucky Charms. Clean it up, Sarah said. So I did.
The south tower crumbled. We saw, slowly, one floor flatten onto another. Like a waterfall.
Will it stop? I thought. Will it stop before it hits the ground?
It seemed to be collapsing forever. One moment, a building stood outside our window, the next moment it was gone.
How could an accident happen twice? We asked ourselves.
We saw people run from the smoke cloud, the ominous, growing pillow of ash and debris. It rolled in through the spaces between buildings, like a disease spreading through veins. The people couldn’t run from it. It swallowed them up. We watched from our fire-proof rooms, twenty-one stories above. We watched, on the television, as the tip of Manhattan disappeared into the cloud of rising ash. The windows were white. We were inside that cloud.
There was a thunderous clap. We three, Sarah, Jeanne and I, stood before the window. Sarah filmed. The camera she had gotten for Christmas last year. Its first videos of us smoking pot and talking about French Fries.
I spilled the Lucky Charms. Clean it up, Sarah said. So I did.
The south tower crumbled. We saw, slowly, one floor flatten onto another. Like a waterfall.
Will it stop? I thought. Will it stop before it hits the ground?
It seemed to be collapsing forever. One moment, a building stood outside our window, the next moment it was gone.
How could an accident happen twice? We asked ourselves.
We saw people run from the smoke cloud, the ominous, growing pillow of ash and debris. It rolled in through the spaces between buildings, like a disease spreading through veins. The people couldn’t run from it. It swallowed them up. We watched from our fire-proof rooms, twenty-one stories above. We watched, on the television, as the tip of Manhattan disappeared into the cloud of rising ash. The windows were white. We were inside that cloud.
Readers Report Back From... Neighborhood - The Rumpus
Market Street is an artery pumping through the neighborhoods of the East Bay flats. We watch from our porch as polished, spotless cars with big rims idle at the stop, then gun it and roar past us. Our neighbors to the north are the Warfields, an African-American family who’s lived in the neighborhood for thirty-five years; carloads of grandkids fill their house at Thanksgiving. Gorge, a young Salvadoran guy, lives east of us with his family. Latin house music and strobe lights beckon us across the street to his dance parties, and he comes to ours, where we play top-forty hip hop and feminist pop punk. Pigeons have broken through the grates that once protected eaves of our the house to the south, and their cooing, sometimes deep, sometimes quick, is constant and erotic outside our bedroom window.
The house we rent went into foreclosure and sold at auction a few weeks after we moved in. Two very young, buff white guys in brightly-colored dress shirts knocked on our door, representing the company that bought our house. The beefier of the two shirts told us, while an elderly white woman in gloves and a hat perused the property, "Neighborhoods like this get better as soon as the over-thirty white crowd moves in.” I think he was trying to reassure us. Maybe he didn’t notice that we, as a couple, we were not over thirty and white.
The house we rent went into foreclosure and sold at auction a few weeks after we moved in. Two very young, buff white guys in brightly-colored dress shirts knocked on our door, representing the company that bought our house. The beefier of the two shirts told us, while an elderly white woman in gloves and a hat perused the property, "Neighborhoods like this get better as soon as the over-thirty white crowd moves in.” I think he was trying to reassure us. Maybe he didn’t notice that we, as a couple, we were not over thirty and white.
