#AmericanWriters
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…
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…
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
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
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?
Lie still now while I prepare for my future, certain hard days ahead, when I’ll need what I know so cle… I am making use
From blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches we bought from the joy at the bend in the road where we t… signs painted Peaches.
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
Through the night the apples outside my window one by one let go their branches and
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.
While the long grain is softening in the water, gurgling over a low stove flame, before the salted Winter Vegetable is sl… for breakfast, before the birds,
We two sit on our bed, you between my legs, your back to me,… slightly bowed, that I may brush a… your hair. My father did this for my mother,
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…
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…
That scraping of iron on iron when… rises, what is it? Something the w… quit with, but drags back and fort… Sometimes faint, far, then suddenl… beyond the screened door, as if so…