I was in my twenties, wandering through downtown Philly in a tight skirt and tall boots. I had a baggie in my sock. The guy at the door didn’t check my purse after all. Just glanced at my ID and waved me inside.
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There aren’t flowers in Darnell’s yard, just big rocks. He unlocks the door and says, “Take off your shoes.” I do as I’m told.
I’m wearing Vans. White Girl Shoes.
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They tend to his body first. They are gagging but try to hide it out of respect for the astronaut’s feelings. They clean him, they comfort him, and they bring him back down into the embrace of gravity.
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I went home to Levittown, and there I found my best friend waiting for me, no older than when I left her twenty years ago. I said, Wow, you look the same as the day I left you. No. No. No, she said. You!
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You only saw the half of it. You can only see so much in that white baptism of light. You, centered in the theater. Te audience: rows of heads, knuckles in the dark.
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There’s a window on the kitchen door that opens into Mother’s soul.
Sundays in Lahore are a lazy business. I roll out of bed by 1 pm; the heat has already baked my exposed skin. The cup of tea and a piece of fried naan, both warmed perfectly, are already on my table.
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Arik at the Jerusalem Print Workshop shows us something the cost of this month’s mortgage payment. The cost of painting the walls in the two girls’ bedrooms and the accent walls in the kitchen and on the staircase.
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Grandma is usually quiet. She forgets names, dates, places, but she has moments of lucidity. She says she’s become a bird.
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i am not always small, somebody’s little sister, somebody’s baby girl born with pneumonia. i guess that makes me a miracle & on god’s green earth how can any miracle be small?
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They give Darrell Grayson the option of Yellow Mama or lethal injection. There is no real fairness in this decision. In not being strung up in a Michael Donald sort of manner.
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I was afraid of cockroaches until I looked at one underneath my microscope. Dialing the lens, my sight spun in and out of focus over a rough, brown landscape.
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Gloria Gao was the first girl I ever hurt. I punched her in the face for calling my family a bunch of dirty mainlanders. I was Taiwanese like her too, but just half, on my mother’s side, which meant the other half of my family must be made up of organ sellers, gutter spitters, and
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The mama mammoth is always there, knee-deep in tar, sinking. Her partner and child wait on the shore. They’re still waiting.
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My colleague and I are drinking beer in a strange town, which confuses him. There are too many consonants, and the gargoyles look odd. The conference we’re attending is inter-disciplinary, and this sets him on edge.
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My grandmother moves mannequins out of the way to get to the refrigerator. It’s a small fridge meant to store kimchi, hidden from customers’ eyes because she covers it with a plaid shawl.
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Michael’s dad died, so we went off to smoke by the BART tracks. Everything meant more when we were stoned, every leaf, every rock, every half-assed piece of graffiti work.
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He found sex disgusting, and I found sex terrifying, and in that way we reached an understanding.
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March 27th , 1981
I twist the curly wire connecting the rotary phone’s receiver to base. My first call to India from nine
thousand miles away.
The first time a guy said I look like a man was at the Jamba Juice stand in the mall. He was still a boy, probably my age and sticky from adolescence. You look like a man. He said it as if he had the right to say anything to me.
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It’s a sticky July Monday in 1972 when Norma Jean Negri hears about the elephant from a traveling circus who’d just been struck by lightning and died. The elephant’s name had been Norma Jean too.
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