i. On the fourth month of the second year of the drought which brought so much despair to our community, the weatherman began to grow his beard. Inconsequential as it might seem to the rest of the world, no event in the annals of our town has been more contentious—except, of course, for the weatherman’s…
I left my house of silence and wrecked my body on the beach of travel. An ocean of bus lines, planes with twin engines, and rubber balls that tumble down stairwells. The road chooses women with shopping bags and greasy faces. It pushes them toward the distance of gas stations and beer stands. Because she…
In the B movie of our lives, there are no panoramas; our limitations have perfected the close-up. Pain is confined to what is visible: slump of the left shoulder, elbow on the table. There’s only room for subplot this side of the proverbial tracks. Sound of vengeance like a passing train, sweet and noble journey…
Retinal snowfall, anything that slips, where children kick a snowman in the dim winter increment, the gray of 3 p.m. Two red cars, one blue. White wing that dips and opens softly in the eyes’ ellipse, an n dimension furling at the rim— a down is paling—shyer motions limn, shyest motions adumbrate the tips— the…
The neighborhood got its first dose of Qamar the summer of her ninth birthday, when she sat on the rooftop of her Alexandria apartment building for ten days and waited for the moon to come down. She did it for her neighbor Metwalli; he promised he’d be hers forever if she only brought him the…
My father rises each morning to the fourteen varieties of banana trees he’s cultivated with unrivaled care, each tree casting shade across our lawn, each racimo an offering my father hacks with his machete, a small cruelty he performs like a doctor circumcising a newborn, though I like to think he is unburdening these trees,…
How many hours did I lie in bed, thought stapling my sixteen-year-old arms to the sheets, thought’s curare, when I finally dialed Tami Jamison, numbing my lips too much to speak? How often did I think, “I’m dead,” feeling my strength leak away, phlegm drown my lungs, sarcomas thrust like red toads up out of…
Flicking her IV line out of the way with the same movement she would use to shoo a fly, Maria Crowley opens the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Catalogue while the new visiting nurse makes herself at home. This one’s name is Corrine, or maybe it is Doreen; she wears Spandex and polyester in icy greens…
After Charles Johnson was leveled, the journey to heaven wasn’t long: for him, the dome of sky only 4,000 miles high, the stars about as far as San Francisco to Boston. Truth is something you iron out. The moonwalk? A hoax. Float too far and you fall off the earth like a barrel going over…
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