It was 1986 and I was staying with my brother in Omdurman close to Khartoum, where the White Nile and the Blue Nile meet. Omdurman was vast, the size of the city, but it was not a city in any way that I recognized. There were no wide streets or squares or municipal buildings, and…
Once, when she’d been walking in her neighborhood, a car had stopped for directions to Alsop, the psychiatric hospital perched above the Blackstone River. How to get there was complicated, the man already so lost in the tangle of leafy streets that Tess hadn’t been sure where to start. Begin at the beginning, wasn’t that…
The woman in the next cubicle: fat ass, the man on the train: fat ass, the director of the nonprofit where I work (though always dieting): fat ass and a bitch. Me on my fourth cookie: fat ass. My mom in her chair: fat ass. My dad in his chair (reclining): fat ass, and my…
Just a few days before her final trip to the ER— after she’d given up bingo and picking up her phone, refused to get out of bed or leave her room, living on a few spoons of broth and saltines she’d crushed with the side of her curled fist? while they were still in their…
My mother, dead at my age, unclasps her beaded purse as if entering my house requires a ticket. For twenty-one years, she says, she’s carried the proper ID for pain, waiting to hand it over. She’s dreamed my body crippled in yesterday’s underwear, my breath caught in phlegm’s thick web. In a doubled brown paper…
1. After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see. And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure That someone was there squinting through…
On a glorious, gilded Levantine morning, the day after the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death, we heard the flapping of Auntie Lulu’s strapless sandals climbing up the two flights of stairs to our landing. Glee and smile wrinkles overwhelmed my mother’s face. She looked invigorated, as if she’d been dunked in an Italian fountain…
I was looking at the Brian Bourke exhibition in the Fairgreen Gallery.? Outside, a man lay collapsed on the ground. It was freaking people out? they kept coming in telling the person? at the desk about the man on the ground. After a while the guards came, they were wearing blue gloves.? They knew the…
Somewhere between here and Louisiana, I changed Pants. The money I carried, each quarter I counted And counted on is missing. Men and women bear Kegs and cartons, bananas and eggs. I need Sugar, some smokes, a single can of coke To get through the margins where I write, Metaphor=tenor+vehicle for children who beg To…
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