on the sidewalk. The sky was blue back then, the road empty. Today, a smoke cloud lingers from fires burning elsewhere, and when I look out the window the sun burns a perfect red hole through the sky. Looking at it now, I can’t help but be taken back there, to the end…
Wisteria sinensis thick as a wrist, wrapped around brick, or pine, or some other living thing: it’s not suffocation if it’s also beautiful. It is not invasive if it also heralds spring. All winter you waited for the creeping vine to burst forth, earlier than trumpet. The purple of early…
It’s beautiful to be glad to see a person every time you see them, as I was to see Juan, the maintenance man, with whom it was always the same brotherly greeting—each of us thumping fist over heart, and grinning, as though we shared a joke, or bread. I barely knew him. Evenings in clinic,…
The cardinal at my window sings year-round, does not migrate or shed her colors, builds an open cup from parched grass and the hair she plucks from the dog’s bristled ear, cannot bear the sight of her own face reflected in the pane—…
desperately, but your shadow is so interesting— profile in silhouette elegant, nose almost Grecian, receding hairline, high brow suggests perhaps a keen intelligence, capable of reflection, new perspectives. Every movement graceful, not one wasted step or gesture, perfect lyric in black and white, crisp, edgy—not your …
Once, a woman’s musk on the train conjured the pinch of my seaside youth —briny, consistent in its waterlogged blessing. I waited out my contract of subtropical longing, now here, manifested in these splayed, commuters’ bodies peppered with wage and heat, lapping each other daily. I bend down and boost you up, future self,…
Like when she takes out a 1000-piece Abstract—a Kandinsky or mandala of Buddha’s numberless lives— she’s telling me she hasn’t lost hope yet but it’s iffy for us. When Lois slides from the shelf one from The World’s Great Destinations series, for example, “Balloons on a Spring Night over Paris,”—actually, any place we’ve been…
It may have been one of the times we died, only to come right back. Maybe we rolled the car and were reborn in the woods without a clue. At least I hope death is like this: a town with just two restaurants. What a steady fire I make against the night. What a good…
The Nile will teem with frogs. They will come up into your palace and your bedroom and onto your bed…and into your ovens and kneading troughs. —EXODUS 8:3 When, as punishment, my father made me read the Book of Exodus, he never offered explanation. The lesson, perhaps, was: Fathers should speak to their sons…
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