The body is the herb, the mind is the honey. The heart, the heart is the undifferentiated. The mind touches the body and is the sun. The mind touches the heart and is music. When body touches heart they together are the moon in the silently falling snow over there. Which is truth exceeding, is…
Rain chewed fresh gullies in the ridge road, turning the hard clay dirt to a yellow paste. The ditch overflowed and gray air blurred the low horizon. Dripping tree leaves hung limp and heavy, aimed at the ground. "It'll pass," Mercer said. Coe lit a cigarette and opened the pickup's window an inch. Pellets of…
Divina Trace is a Caribbean novel set on the island of Corpus Christi. It is the story of Magdalena and her mysterious child, believed by the islanders to be half-man and half-frog (crapo). Magdalena is transformed into a miraculous black Madonna later in the book, and she becomes the island's collective goddess and patron saint-worshipped…
We come to each other exactly at the center, the spine of ample fire, and suffer to be revised. Stay with me. Weren't we promised the sheer flame, bright change so clean even our clothes wouldn't smell of smoke, not one hair of our heads would be singed? Yet, just now, didn't the tongues slip…
My cousin's kids are here—or near and living with Aunt Cyn. They can't win. They can't believe their father's dead. Nor I. Why, at Mother's funeral only months ago he said. Have some kids! Lose some weight! Wear better clothes! (Always the Parisian to my hippie.) His kids were what he lived for! Six months…
That was the winter the city hired two guys to demolish by hand our neighbor's arsoned house— chimney, foundation, beams on the second floor. All January they worked with a tea kettle whistling on a trash fire, a boom box full of James Brown “feeling good.” I didn't, sitting in my coat cheering through a…
A speech delivered on June 12, 1990 in Tokyo at the American Center. First of all, may I present two stories from two different parts of my own country. One month ago, in Iowa, I went with my next-door neighbor, Cheryl Huang, to attend her swearing-in ceremony as a new American citizen. Cheryl is of…
—Here, Dad laughs and I shoot my arm straight out into Sunday. Sax-honks rock the radio. I wheel this Chevy in sunlight, roll off onto a long, disappearing country road. In the rearview a cloud of our best summer is pouring up behind. —Easy, he says. Easy. It goes forever. He's here to show me…
Dearest K., I dream of houses burning, skeletons of houses, row upon row of charred frames of houses crumbling like the ash of a cigar. I walk the streets as if their planned and crisscrossed patterns could contain a human life, as if that life would not spill over. How long have you been dead?…
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