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It was Menasha, the name in the middle — not Murray — which my Grandmother thought more “American” — in reality Irish, like the ones who left their homes to them. Menasha or Manasseh, the half tribe, brother to Ephraim, son of Joseph- Israel-Jacob's son who blessed not him the elder, but Ephraim, his younger…

All day I've been thinking of the grief on each of their faces, Adam and Eve. The feeling is closest to a wave as it peaks, how it seems on the verge of self-consciousness before it collapses. Their mouths hold a single sound that divides, familiar as rain. The angel points away from the green…

Cloves were four-eighty-nine a jar in the supermarket two years ago. And I felt my heart race at the cost and bought them, an investment, their value rising higher than silver earrings, handmade at the silver shop for six dollars that same year. The cloves were perfume in the silver spicebox shaped like a castle,…

Cumana in August is not so bad. True, it's winter and the days get shorter. But not because the sun does. Because the rain comes earlier and earlier until one is almost back in his home by noon. The mountains are worse. Invierno: winter wet, summer hot. The rivers swell, creciente; from upriver down, dark…

He played a paralyzed man once, before I knew him. He made his own body settle into a position of broken readiness, hunched on the rotting pins of his bones. I thought I'd seen it before: actors in wheelchairs as actors in wheelchairs. But he gave that damage power, a sound in the throat that…

—for Catherine Tinker When Augusta, the teen-aged empleada, expressed bewilderment at the two friends' behaviour, “Oh, they're North Americans,” the Dona said, implying that explained everything. She stretched, with the telephone parked on the zipper of her overalls. Message-pad leaves were scattered over all the desks and shelves. This house's empleada primarily answered the telephone….

—for Bill Aron Iris to iris, all these clicks should parcel out a single ribbon of behavior into chapters of a person. Trying not to try, I try a grin which over-ages into grimace, just as the shutter steps aside. O look, a butterfly, a butterfly! Oh no, too late. Someone, please help me not…

I didn't know you at first, your face in the mirror instead of mine, that night they put me in your room to sleep. You stared back still young in manner, your smile fixed, but defiant, sensual as the chokecherries red in their tart suspension below in the root cellar where the dusty jars still…

Iva asks me for stories of her father's family. I learned them second-hand -not even a Christain, and not black. I think of a reflective membrane: classes, mirrored, meld. She starts with slavery. The eight-year-old hunkered in the old man's barrel-staves to hide when the blue horseman (she breathed in horse) leaned toward her grandfather…