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Someone asked me once if the world changed whenever I crossed from one language to the other. She said she noticed how my voice changed. I listened to myself: it was the same voice, the same man speaking a strange language. I wondered about my face—if a certain look might be possible only in one…

They make pleasure their first food in the morning, They take their iron wings from under the bed And strap them on in the sun, they grow hotter Than the noon light on the Mission. Afterwards they bathe in snow And dress in feathers of mercury—. Each day is the front of war, With its…

It's not the wave that will devour you, arms and braids and all. Not even the stranger you won't look at in the shiny car. Not the topography of deserts, where you follow streambeds through the night, gobbling up the stars like sugar, ready to break the moon in half. Not even the mountain that…

Try to think of Palm Springs as a breast, a nipple of dust crumbling on itself. I don't know how else to put it. The earth trembles beneath us like a loud cancer spreading, leaving scars everywhere. The desert is in bloom this time of year—purple and yellow flowers growing all the way to Nevada,…

I stood as long as I could on the edge of the pole house, one finger on reality, storms I could count, and a cup of milk in my other hand like a virtue I did not possess but nevertheless, took to my grip. As to the piñon and scrub oak at my feet I…

My house was a house of winds, and my father was of the wind, and we were of the earth and we were torn by him, we were stripped by him, by the bellows of his body, by the twisting of his voice coming shaking, elemental, before the kitchen table where we sat like stones…

Half the town fits in the rearview mirror. One day the mirror falls from the windshield and the town shatters like a bad dream. You know how it is. One day you move to California. There is this club in Santa Monica—a renovated basement where you dance to songs about money. Your accomplice says there's…

I keep my eye on the desert room floating with silver and black blades, the shadows of date palms in the hands of the vanished magician. He is silent, missing repeatedly the lady in the white box. She's made an austere retreat into yet another nothing, into my own approval of not-doing in this heat!…

If it's appendicitis, you're in trouble out here on the Isla de Malhado. Despite bright stars there are disturbances. It's three o'clock in the morning. Ashore on the Isla de Malhado the shipwrecked Spanish came to no good end. It's three o'clock in the morning. If it's not an emergency, go back to bed. The…