Each summer when I’m in Krakow, I make weekly trips to a flea market close to our apartment. This particular market also sells antiques, but it doesn’t aspire to a loftier name, because it also peddles secondhand books, last year’s issues of fashion magazines, handmade jewelry, items that aren’t old in the sense that antiques…
Diane stands on the bar of the trapeze, pacing and gesturing nonchalantly as a professor lecturing on the ground might. We stand in a circle at her feet, self-conscious in our leotards. We look up hopefully, with awe…we are hoping that she can teach us to fly too. I suspect that as little girls we…
From Years Ago, a memoir Tory Fukada showed me how to crank the corners and I practiced, abandoning the graceful strokes of cursive she’d also taught for the bold design, which seemed meant to be carved but smoldered like a brand. Dozens whirled like pinwheels on the barbed-wire page. I loved the prickly maze, the…
A map unfolds into a world where new poems, new ways of writing them, a new way of living, become possible. My turning points have included the discovery of the city of Istanbul, where I spend a few weeks every year, and my eventual immigration to Ireland, where I now live. With an accent instantly…
I am a child of a Confessor, born in 1956, the same year the McCarthyesque Chinese Confession Program was sanctioned. Its purpose, simply put, was to seek and flush out Chinese—arriving or already landed—who held derivative citizenships. America began with an open door policy that admitted everyone but "lepers, prostitutes, and morons." The Chinese were…
After my mother died, I needed a word to describe how I felt. When I couldn’t find one, I realized that what I needed was not so much a word, as a sound, a sob, or maybe even a howl, a noise only the other motherless could hear, and come running. If I couldn’t find…
On a motorcycle, a dash to the grocery store takes on epic proportions. It requires armor: you pull on stiff black boots; zip yourself into a thick leather jacket with kevlar plates at the shoulder and elbow; squeeze into your helmet, buckle the chinstrap; pull on long leather gloves with hard knuckles. Hazards abound: cars…
“If it is true that there is an origin of language and if it is true that the origin of language is other to the uttered experience of language, then the origin is irreparably lost and unreachable.” —Paolo Bartoloni I. It was snowing that day. A scree of snow fell against a sky so white…
From White Out , a memoir “Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting That would not let me sleep.” -Hamlet My Dad puts the gun in my hands. The barrel is cold. Cold like a rock you lay across in winter before it snows. But it’s autumn now. The trees all around…
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