#AmericanWriters
When the wind turns and asks, in my father’s voi… Have you prayed? I know three things. One: I’m never finished answering to th…
Someone said my name in the garden… while I grew smaller in the spreading shadow of the peo… grew larger by my absence to anoth… grew older among the ants, ancient
Choose a quiet place, a ruins, a house no more a house, under whose stone archway I stood one day to duck the rain.
He gossips like my grandmother, th… with my face, and I could stand amused all afternoon in the Hon Kee Grocery, amid hanging meats he
I’ve pulled the last of the year’s… The garden is bare now. The grou… brown and old. What is left of th… in the maples at the corner of my eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.
Tonight my brother, in heavy boots… through the bare rooms over my hea… opening and closing doors. What could he be looking for in an… What could he possibly need there…
Forgive me for thinking I saw the irregular postage stamp of dea… a black moth the size of my left thumbnail is all I’ve trapped in t… There is no need for alarm. And
In the steamer is the trout seasoned with slivers of ginger, two sprigs of green onion, and ses… We shall eat it with rice for lunc… brothers, sister, my mother who wi…
People have been trying to kill me… a man tells his son, trying to exp… the wisdom of learning a second to… It’s the same old story from the p… about my father and me.
It’s late. I’ve come to find the flower which blossoms like a saint dying upside down. The rose won’t do, nor the iris. I’ve come to find the moody one, t…
Sad is the man who is asked for a… and can’t come up with one. His five-year-old son waits in his… Not the same story, Baba. A new o… The man rubs his chin, scratches h…
Childhood? Which childhood? The one that didn’t last? The one in which you learned to be… of the boarded-up well in the back… and the ladder in the attic?
She begins, and my grandmother joi… Mother and daughter sing like youn… If my father were alive, he would… his accordion and sway like a boat… I’ve never been in Peking, or the…
Here, as in childhood, Brother, n… And someone has died, and someone… born, while our father walks throu… and sets all the clocks for spring… weighs heavy on my forehead, his d…
When I lay my head in my mother’s… I think how day hides the stars, the way I lay hidden once, waiting inside my mother’s singing to hers… how she carried me on her back