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Archipelago

Since I was a child, I’ve had nightmares of annihilation. Though they disappeared in my twenties, they resurfaced here and there in my thirties, and in my forties, they became frequent. Sometimes they were tied to world events; other times to stresses at work, in life. During that very long year, they involved being trapped…

POEM

You will never finish your life the way you intended. The bed you will never get up from is not the one you wanted, by a lake or river’s edge where the light touches each bird awake except the one that kept watch all night.

[It is like a long tunnel]

It is like a long tunnel, the strange, shallow light of the hospital hallway shining against all the stainless steel they always put around those kinds of places. The steel shines a dark, tunnelish light. A feeling of objectivity they want to impart to you. Like, your baby has died. Objectively. I read once that…

Polar Sight

Remember the snowed-in highway, the saloon dressed up like a chalet, the auroral sunset falling minute by minute on that lonely desert town? And him watching me as I played dead in the snow— like a salt flat, the snow outside so bright even at dusk and midnight— until I opened my eyes and saw…

Book of Dolls 47

I hurt, my mother said over and over, and powerless to end her misery, we hurt in kind and never quite enough. I am sorry, I said. I say it still. I apologize for experience, aka the world, who could not be here today and sends her condolences. I am sorry, I say from a…

Book of Dolls 50

I am making a doll in the likeness of all that I am not. I know, I know. It is not possible. Wherever I go, I am where I was, as I am now, and everywhere I am not yet. One day I will join a mother, a father, the doll that was a cat…

Duplex (I Will Tell You)

I will tell you all about desire. One night, a man picked up his bag and walked.           One night, my father picked up his bag and walked,           His big brother became the story. My big brother once told a story, He ended up choking on a stroke of joy.           If rightly stroked, would you choke…

3D-cover 483

The Land of Long Days

Everywhere, there are rainbows—on the stairs to Girls’ Block, around the bulletin board announcing our meals for the week, on the playground equipment where we sit during Outdoor Time. (Sometimes Nayeli goes down the rainbow slide, and we follow her, laughing like it’s a big joke—us, pretending to be kids.) There’s a rainbow on the…