Trash

Uncle Fernando’s Garbage Triptych

“This is my family. The Brazilian family that I haven’t seen in over twenty years. My DNA is in that airplane. My past dangles on that branch. My death might be curdling on the milk.”

By Priscila Uppal
Image by Ilona Staples

When you’re angry with someone,
Fernando insists,
never call him garbage.

Anger is nothing to garbage:
garbage eats anger for breakfast.
It eats all of us in the end.

And we’ll be lucky
if anyone remembers us
as well as the earth
remembers our garbage.

You Go to the Movies

Three times Uncle Fernando’s neighbors
have called the police to report him.

When they go to the movies,
he goes through their garbage.

How is this a crime? he argues.
The stuff is right here, out on the street.

I don’t steal it. I just look. It’s my job. The police
eye him warily (Fernando is a big man

with large eyes and cancer scars, and a certified
garbage expert), let him go with another warning.

My fellow creatures have no idea the service
I’m providing, he assures me, as I note

down the contents as he calls them.
You learn much about the world from

its garbage. I nod, plug my nose. I know
he is highly respected in his field, but

this is not the way I imagined my vacation.
Pronto! he cries. Soon they’ll be back from the movies

with all kinds of strange talk and ideas in their heads.

My Uncle Parachutes into Garbage

This is the funniest family video I have ever seen.
Grandmother sits quietly, sipping watermelon juice
while Aunt Victoria serves tiramisu
and tea, and outside a monkey swings from the tree.

One Two Three

Uncle drops out of the sky like a giant fly.
Long arms and legs extend out against the shiny window
of the clouds. On his back, Daffy Duck gives us all the finger,
and I laugh, but no one else does. Grandmother shrugs;
Victoria confers with the servants.

Why Daffy Duck? I ask.
Palotino, my uncle replies, in Portuguese.
Daffy’s like me. Like how I wish to be.
No wife. No children. No family.

Now his wife laughs. And my cousin Fernanda.
Loco, his wife announces. It’s the first word she’s said
to me since I’ve been here.

This is my family. The Brazilian family
that I haven’t seen in over twenty years.
My DNA is in that airplane. My past
dangles on that branch. My death might
be curdling on the milk.

The screen wiggles for a second. Then—
blank. My uncle shrugs. I landed
right in there—right in the middle of the trash—
I couldn’t have planned it any better.

He snags the video out of the machine,
sits down for ice cream. But my mind is still flying
with him, dropping out of sight,
and past all known geography
into a future family photograph
on Aunt Victoria’s mantel
beside her porcelain bells and liqueur glasses
and a bright orange broken bird’s beak.