There are times I think the past is nothing more than a room attached to ours. We enter it a hundred times a day, argue with whoever’s there; we flatten a cowlick, move the vase, true the picture on the wall. I was looking out at the garden the other day (something I tend to…
that spins too fast and then we get erased. The red and yellow leaves tickle at first, then burn all the way down our throats when they fall. Who will grease our arms for the ones we love? We release them to white bedsheets first, then to a blanket made of earth. They slip through…
“This structure has two helical chains each coiled around the same axis…It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairings we have postulated immediately suggest a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” —J. D. Watson and Francis Crick, on their discovery of the structure of DNA. I. In 1972, my father-in-law, Ron,…
First in a series of essays called, collectively, My Mother’s Story. My mother, Kathleen Klin Phoa circa 1948. Fact. A student at St. Mary’s Canossian secondary school in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Fact. Despite the hiatus that was the war, she was still a girl. Oh, she knew she was almost a woman, but inside,…
I’m only a human. Always is only in meas long as I last. What do I want? Don’t ask. We forget who we are. Conformists all alonelooking for a fake mirror and finding itin some poker nobody sitting across the aisle. To be like some other and feel that.While I am walking aroundon the only…
I enter my name into a search engine. There are 3,700 results. The word torture appears in most of them. I read the blogs. I read the comments that follow. I find more blogs. I pretend those don’t bother me either. I check e-mail, thirty-eight new messages. Mr. Fair, I’m not at all sure why…
If only our children were colts, and sensible enough to be good at one thing.Running. Jumping some. Looking adorable.They would deserve our devotion.Think crepe myrtle, nudged after a brief rain. Think zealots. Think ocean waves, if we’d enough sense to give them unique personalities.Everywhere you look, willfulness. Bountiful willfulness.And these days it’s the children you see playing…
When they run out of meat men disappear. I chew my hair, a kind of fullness that is kind, a thread soup. A nest gathers its strands inside me. The dead hatch, translucent-eyed, wire-boned, small whistling through beaks. We share our (secret) feast, miles of hair to keep us warm. I rock on my heels in the middle of…
Now and then, you heard the copters Flying in search of inmates who’d escaped. Mostly, though, it was quiet. At night, outside, The cats would fight and fuck and knock shit down, The couple next door would simmer in heat Or bitterness. Sometimes you saw them, In the window-glass, appearing Like quarter-moons through mist. There…
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