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…
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…
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…
I am small and don't want much at all. I live in a striped quilt And curl up near the door. Grandpa tripped On me and broke his jaw. I drop My doll's head in the cake. I always wear pink. I smile in school and dunk My own curls in the ink. I share…
The woman wore a floral apron around her neck, that woman from my mother's village with a sharp cleaver in her hand. She said, “What shall we cook tonight? Perhaps these six tiny squids lined up so perfectly on the block?” She wiped her hand on her apron, pierced the blade into the first. There…
Haphazardly a blizzard collects over our window as if the moon, weaving between clouds, were breathing it. In the same window seat, stitched with lilies, each minute prickly, in which she read me forty-five years back her favorite, “Hansel and Gretel,” I am reading to my sister the same tale tonight. She is fifty-eight, I…
There is a crooked keloid scar on the side of Tally's golden face that says, “I don't give a damn.” Around his neck he wears the Star of David—no special significance. His left arm from shoulder down is tattooed marine-blue and between me and you, Tally ain't all there. But why should he care? Down…
War chariots thunder, horses neigh, the barbarians are coming. What are we waiting for, young nubile women pointing at the wall, the barbarians are coming. They have heard about a weakened link in the wall. So, the barbarians have ears among us. So deceive yourself with illusions: you are only one woman, holding one broken…
It is Thursday, raining You ask me a question I try to answer quickly definitively or thought- fully for truly I do not know I go off to think—but nothing answers— so hard so long I lose sight And you who asked are no longer there Or you are—though not as the person who…
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