There was something secretive about it. When I walked into the library and turned right and kept walking, they were there. Had I ever seen a magazine before I got to college? I had. Had I ever seen a literary journal? I had not. I was a seventeen-year-old girl who left high school a year…
They’d take her child away, unless he shed more weight. But every time he cried, she fed. More weight. My little niece too light, and snow not dense enough, I squeezed myself behind her on the sled: more weight. So thin her body cannot warm itself, she picks at the meager salad on her plate….
Samurai sword-fighting lesson, Tokyo We’re using the iaito or “practice sword” now as opposed to the shinken or “live sword” which looks as though it can cut through lampposts and is “hungry for the flesh of its owner,” says smiling Sakaguchi-san through a translator, which is why I’m getting lots of unintentional laughs when I…
In a Washington Post article, Elizabeth Strout discusses how, as a girl, she played people-watching games with her mother. Together, they would imagine the lives of strangers they saw around town. "It seemed to me," Strout says, "from an early age, that nothing was ever as fun as that…The first ambition I remember having was…
Hanoi streets on their last demise do not shine like yellow bananas. The color of brown spotted ripe bananas for straight eleven eves, Coated with layers of night fumes. Seven women on their bicycles steer by a smoggy sundown. Threatening bombs like alarm clocks tick in my ears, As war fumes snatch the pretty red…
Now they were in the car, a half hour late, on the way to lunch with Tina. Mary drove. Mary had said she’d leave him if he lied to her about other women again, and now she was leaving. It had all come out this morning. He felt sick. She seemed calm, determined, cold. It…
Is it too soon to murmur in her ear that I miss someone? The statue of liberty stands so still underneath a rainbow. She won’t mind if I play with the copper flame on her green torch. She can fool around with my liberated heart until it burns into ashes. Let me be the one…
Kenya, Africa. Africa! Nine thousand miles from Portland. My wayward son Tim walks toward me with four tall, dark-as-midnight women. He has seen me, I’m quite sure of it, but nothing about his gait changes. He arrives at the tent and doesn’t say a word, or make any motion toward me. The thirty or so…
Here is the paint-by-numbers painting of Sitting Bull’s pony she painted. Here is her imitation Navajo loom she used to weave turquoise blankets. Here is her afternoon martini shaker and the prescription Black Beauties. Mahjong tiles click rhythmically by arthritic hands of her bilingual generation. Outside the rain rains sideways, horizontal as this world is,…
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