It’s because you’re a woman that you don’t want me to die, Tayari says. On their way home, the No. 6 train sidling its slow way through the South Bronx, she has her head in his lap, her long gangly legs splayed out over three seats, fingers hooked into his dreadlocks. She likes to…
Sky, cloudless. Light, unhampered as it falls across the mountains, across the lake, across the trees surrounding the lake. Day after day, a woman watches this light move across the landscape. In her story, the hero sails away, saddened, angry— while the light casts harsh shadows. The hero is never seen again. Everyone speaks of…
You have been here before and you remember the empty streets, the fire, and after that the stairs crowded with bells. This pregnant woman was your wife, she laughed—and whispered the story to her belly: how did the deafness come? To the sound of bells— you bent to tie your shoes to the sound of…
It seems insane now, but she’d be standing soaked in school day morning light, her loose-leaf notebook, flickering at the bus stop, and we almost trembled at the thought of her mouth filled for a moment with both of our short names. I don’t know what we saw when we saw her face, but at…
We will eventually be archaeology, but now in America I tell my young daughter the new headlights are a bluish-white instead of the smoky yellow of my upbringing. She’s busy with her bubble-making, her dig in the flowerbed, her pantomimed banquet, phantom guests dining on her small handfuls of weeds and grasses. Precisely, the lit…
I saw once, in a rose garden, a remarkable statue of the Roman she-wolf and her twins, a reproduction of an ancient statue—not the famous bronze statue, so often copied, in which the wolf’s blunt head swings forward toward the viewer like a sad battering ram, but an even older statue, of provenance less clear….
Just as I’m going into the native seed store, where the ancient seeds of the world’s various peoples are kept and sold so that they can perhaps root in tomorrow’s ground, a young man who was just on the other side of the street, yelling furiously at his stoned friend on the other, quiets the…
I don’t know, he said, I guess it’s something I’d like, an ocean with such ugly fish down there dark, ones with barbs and lantern lights affixed to their heads. It’s all I got, said the voice. And this wet suit to go with it, this backpack of oxygen, this camera, this knife. Be careful….
www.youtube.com So, here’s Edith Piaf, widow and orphan, fists clenched and tipped forward for emphasis: No, she sings, I regret nothing, not the good, not the bad. And you want to believe it too, you’re trying to believe it, and you who should have married or moved sing along. You who could have done more…
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