What you snuck past: a vast copper body, two plastic hands all the better to twist you from this empty palace. You are not yet who you will be, little sac of yolk, blood clot drifting through. What should we do with you who bedded down in a field of red clover? You want a piece of cake, meat silky and tender, slipping…
The old city rushes into me as soon as the plane descends, and my drunk bravado shudders. I swear to myself that I will not confront my family with my suffering this time around. I’ll be a civilized person instead and keep longstanding resentment to myself. Even the part of me that is gristle and…
Cenk checked his Rolex as he waited for his car. It was past 11:00 p.m. The glass over the black dial with silver numbers reflected the multicolored lights from the towering Boğaziçi Bridge, which was less than two hundred meters away and dominated the skyline. The changing lights zigzagged like the pattern on a backgammon…
I think I first really became aware of the word “beautiful” when, as a young woman, I lived for a while in New York City. The adjective was everywhere, so it seemed, describing anything from a club to an oyster to a state of mind. “Oh, you’re going to that party? Beautiful.” “You won’t believe…
O cotton-headed kissful. Tender liking of my broken skin. Fierce betrayal of instinct wrapped in embers and undiagnoses. I have missed you. I think you might have been just the first of my forbidden desires, artifact of my deep impulse to transition a thing to another thing. Take medicine and turn it into a weapon….
I don’t know what death is either, I think, unplugging the earbuds and ordering a decaf latte, iced. I don’t know where my father is, or mother, or where to tell my daughter she can find me. I watch the barista make the espresso shots—her down-to-there, sapling arms, the left one hanging lifeless while the…
When I needed a Barden bumper for my bumper-less truck, I walked through a junkyard: bolts & gauges on the ground, wheels rolling nowhere or steering nothing, dead headlights illuminated by sunbeams. A bird alit on chrome. I shivered at the delicacy of what I could not see: a laugh & This is my favorite…
As the war droned on, my wife’s Saigon university finally paid her salary after we threatened a lawsuit, paying her all at once at the end of the school year in so many packets of devalued piasters that we had to carry it away in two suitcases, making our motorcycle trip back to our apartment…
We moved out here only five months ago, and I remain haunted by the feeling that the whole process was in some way too easy. Thirty-plus years brushed away, as if they had not been the key years of our family life. All that time had been given, had befallen us. The transition itself seemed…
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