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To One Waiting to Be Born

1. Know your origin: you are a token of the afterwards of love. What flinches in the ribbon of your utterly new blood is nothing but the echo of a bed post— pulse.            You have grown up. From filament within your mother’s bulb, you have evolved into a chandelier of bones, weightlessly orbiting your portion…

Ghost Lessons

All winter the ghosts were waiting for a new high-school teacher who refused to appear, and so you were roped in. February had the year on pause, the days like holes that tripped you over and over in the frozen yard. You had no knowledge of history or chemistry yet were expected to teach the…

Dancing in Buses

Pretend a boom box blasts over your shoulder. Raise your hands in the air. Twist them as if picking mangoes. Look to the right as if crossing streets. Look to the left, slowly as if balancing orange baskets. Bend as if picking cotton. Do the rump. Straighten up as if dropping firewood. Rake, do the…

Pretty

If Trudy had scooped the keys from Karl’s hand, if she had trilled, “How about I drive this time,” or if she had snapped, “You’ve got no business behind the wheel, you should know that by now,” they would have been stopped at that light, Trudy fiddling with the vents as the mist crept up…

My Happiness

You wander into my thought, my happiness, the way the deer wander through the yard these days, very relaxed, with no thought of being hunted, browsing the bushes near the driveway like people at the refreshment table of an art opening… That’s how you come over me— not with a burst of wings, but with…

The Great Dream: A Plan B Essay

  In the Plan B essay series, writers discuss their contingency plans, extraliterary passions, and the roads not traveled.   For my family, Plan B wasn’t the fallback plan for when life went awry. Life was already awry, and they’d already seen their hopes and ambitions compromised. So Plan B—what they would do if they…

About Peter Ho Davies

The novelist and short-story writer Peter Ho Davies was born in 1966 in Coventry, England. Peter’s father had grown up in North Wales and Peter spent most of his boyhood vacations there with family, amid countryside he has described as beautiful but also—from a boy’s perspective—“slightly dull.” His mother was of Chinese descent and met…

Landlocked

What am I doing, trudging around Natick, Massachusetts, so archetypal in its split-level, clapboard ordinariness, one house after another like a crowd gathered haphazardly at an accident site? And why explore the deafening blandness of the little streets with fenced-in yards, where day after day—iPod loaded with arias— Ti prego, rubami il cuore!—I wheel the…