Exiled from yourself, you fuse with everything you meet. You imitate whatever comes close. You become whatever touches you. –Luce Irigaray,This Sex Which Is Not One At night I sleep without movement in the suburbs of a Phoenix desert, having dreams of hot plants in the Andes, dreams filled with parents as they talk to…
I spoke to my daughter, Anya, in complete sentences when she was a conceptee and I listened for a response in her earliest cries. Some books recommended baby talk, and that was my wife, Moira’s, language with Anya, but I preferred plain English. Why offer her ears a blurry target? When it didn’t drive me…
I am reading The New York Times on Sunday, January 4, 1994. There is the following headline: recompense being sought for massacre. The article underneath the headline describes events of seventy-one years ago when a white mob terrorized a black town in Florida. The town was named Rosewood. During the rampage of the white mob…
Thousands of tiny fists tamping the surface of the lake flowing like a wide river gone crazy, southeast, westnorth letting the wind push it around in its bed and the boat hull hugging the shore. What else can she do? Even the trees agree, shaking their crowns, throwing down their leaves as if she were…
Half of us were enrolled in the Army. Half of us were not. Half of us watched for thieves in the factories and were given no sleep. Half recited the day’s events into machines equipped with sensitive needles. Half never stopped training, and buried dried food at spots marked in red on maps. The songs…
While he was the governor of Leeds Prison, my uncle Bourke was late for breakfast twice. Usually he’d finished eating by quarter past eight, and by eight-thirty he was walking down the avenue of horse chestnuts which led from our front door to the main road; there he caught the No. 16 Wingate tram to…
The summer I was six, my parents rented an old gray-shingled house surrounded by tall hedges on a foggy, dissolving spur of Massachusetts shoreline, a house I still consider my most indelible home. We stayed there just three months, long enough for me to grow a quarter inch and to need new sneakers. One of…
AS As you come and go from a place you sense the way it might seem to one truly there as these clearly determined persons move on the complex spaces and hurry to their obvious or so seeming to you destinations. “Home,” you think, “is a place still there for all,” yet now you cannot…
1. He looked at the seed for a long time. His mind did not comprehend. It did not flower anymore. The seed was just a seed. She had said it was begonia. He tried to imagine what begonias looked like. Purple blossoms, rich yellow, supple orange, blue petals? The mind that made the seed…
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