At the front desk, Mamoru tells the receptionist that they are married. “Yes, my wife prefers darker colors. She would like one that’s dark blue or indigo,” he says, selecting the yukata that they will wear to dinner. Sachiko can hear him from where she sits in the lobby. The inn, Oyako Koto no Yume,…
translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra Nina Hansen’s on her way home and it’s been a long day. While she was researching and writing, she almost didn’t notice that buzzing in her ear. Her left ear. When she’s idle and alone, it feels as if a bumblebee’s sitting in there, the kind you find…
Every drip startles me: rain falling off the edge of moon into the earth. Asleep next to a man who does not love me any more than he loves a river. I move to another room, closer to the rain without being touched. My brother sleeps (does he sleep?) in a rehab center in the…
“Fire at a Brooklyn Warehouse Puts Private Lives on Display,” (1 Feb 2015, The New York Times) No lives were lost. Nothing was gutted but the crumpling warehouse and its contents: medical forms, court transcripts, sonograms, bank checks. THEY’RE LIKE TREASURE MAPS, someone said of the half-charred scraps. But they weren’t. This was the opposite—…
It’s 11:02. I was supposed to take the kids outside at 10:13. My underwear is over my head. I’m trying to sniff out the boy I once was, my private parts tiny and nutmeg. I didn’t give a shit about Superman. I was in love with Watergate. Watergate was my super hero. All that corruption….
This is the latching on. You are shelter and source, and this is the smell of only you. The hands that hold and lift and swaddle, the mouth that smiles and sings me, the eyes that look me into being: yours. This is the skin to skin. I cry to make the hungry stop and…
In this new country of ours we will, let’s face it, be endlessly debating, endlessly refining, so much talking!—at least in the beginning, when we’ve just arrived. And probably later as well, always arriving as we are in this mortality, with so much to say and so little mind-reading. We will continue to use words…
In our new country we will notice, cherish, entirely disregard time, inhale hours and exhale days, float and surf and snorkel into the minutes and years, time like a blanket over or under us, wrapped around our beachchilled skin. Our time will be free of owners, a fact of life on this particular planet, like…
In the new country we will bike through the town in most weather, barrowing smaller humans or parcels in the front when we must or like, pulling wagons, flashing our prettiest wheel-lights at night, double-riding, even triple-riding. Mostly we will wheel through the streets at a leisurely speed allowing for chitchat, perhaps playing the old…
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