They’d take her child away, unless he shed more weight. But every time he cried, she fed. More weight. My little niece too light, and snow not dense enough, I squeezed myself behind her on the sled: more weight. So thin her body cannot warm itself, she picks at the meager salad on her plate….
Samurai sword-fighting lesson, Tokyo We’re using the iaito or “practice sword” now as opposed to the shinken or “live sword” which looks as though it can cut through lampposts and is “hungry for the flesh of its owner,” says smiling Sakaguchi-san through a translator, which is why I’m getting lots of unintentional laughs when I…
Hanoi streets on their last demise do not shine like yellow bananas. The color of brown spotted ripe bananas for straight eleven eves, Coated with layers of night fumes. Seven women on their bicycles steer by a smoggy sundown. Threatening bombs like alarm clocks tick in my ears, As war fumes snatch the pretty red…
Is it too soon to murmur in her ear that I miss someone? The statue of liberty stands so still underneath a rainbow. She won’t mind if I play with the copper flame on her green torch. She can fool around with my liberated heart until it burns into ashes. Let me be the one…
Here is the paint-by-numbers painting of Sitting Bull’s pony she painted. Here is her imitation Navajo loom she used to weave turquoise blankets. Here is her afternoon martini shaker and the prescription Black Beauties. Mahjong tiles click rhythmically by arthritic hands of her bilingual generation. Outside the rain rains sideways, horizontal as this world is,…
When I stopped along the road and climbed the platform that the wildlife people built, I saw the dead grass moving. A darker gold that broke free from the pale gold of the field. “Wolves,” said the man who stood beside me on the platform. On his other side stood his wife and children, I…
Wine festered—a thorn at the bottom of my skull. Wind blew all the night’s big ideas off the trees. The moon had frostbite. The stars did, too. Be kind to animals was my mother’s mantra. Do your duty was my father’s. Ghosts breathed on my rearview mirror as I drove downtown. On black ice glistening…
—not in knowledge, but in calm; not in indifference, but nearly. Under bullying fog the white houses stand with effort on the coast, the tides teasing the scrub blue, the land beneath hassled by waves, drowning in salt-wine. The lichen, as scalloped and ridged as the cliffs, breathes red and gold; its smell, like the…
I’m a pea farmer. There’s a stream out back. I like the sound of it. One day out of the week, I bring home a string of brown trout and slap them down on the kitchen table. The fish god provides. If someone knocks on my door rather than stroll in, I don’t like it….
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