Article

  • Paradise

    After the protests began, I started running on the beach. I went up every day after work, took off my long sleeves and concealing skirts, slid into nylon shorts and a tanktop. Then I ran. Two kilometers north along the curve of the beach, followed by a swim in the warm, enervating sea. The run…

  • Scenes From a Romance

    The chair breathes for hours. Off in another country, a waiter yells at me—You can't save anyone you can only save food. Plastic bags for dogs. Here's my friend at last back from the bathroom. He breathes like a chair. Save me, for I am green fruit, it is raining, and I shall fall too…

  • ghost marriage

    paper stars and moon      three tiered houses and their utensils fast heated column of paper money lifted by ghosts the impatient and delighted spark here are two houses crackling to heaven      paper rabbit lantern tinseled and sprung into celebration and from the mud bath the ghosts lay paper rice into their mouths fire dribbling down…

  • Blue Norther

    We're mining a vein of blue clay under the red dusty Texas topsoil, squaring up a ditch the backhoe left too rough and can't get back to. We slice at the walls with the sides of our shovels and peel up from the bottom long curls of clay that twist away like orange rind. "The…

  • Hacienda del Sol

    There was a time when gas station attendants cleaned car windshields with soft blue paper towels. My dad inherited the company that made those blue paper towels, and shortly after the Arab oil embargo, due to poor financial planning, he went bankrupt. With no responsibilities in the towel business he turned to what really interested…

  • Goa Lawah, Bali

    The offerings began at dawn and the villagers made no fuss about sharing the rear of the temple yard with them fluttering home like charred paper sucked in by the space, into the mouth of the cave that looks out to the sea, the sandstone walls vibrating under the grip of 100,000 fruit bats. In…

  • Lives of the Fathers

    My father is telling me about Victoria again. I smile, nod, remind him I am a journalist and that I cannot just sit down and write a book about Victoria because he is sure it will make a best seller, full of romance, intrigue, and heartbreak. "It's rags to riches to rags again!" my father…

  • Kubota

    On December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, my grandfather barricaded himself with his family-my grandmother, my teenage mother, her two sisters and two brothers-inside of his home in La'ie, a sugar plantation village on Oahu's North Shore. This was my maternal grandfather, a man most villagers called…