From a talk presented at the Library of Congress on 3 August 2019, as part of the Asian American Literature Festival
“An intimate lecture.” That was how Lawrence-Minh Davis, one of the intrepid, visionary curators of this festival, …
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Features
Because of This Woman, I Plant Marigolds
As a child I wanted to know why God put me in this body that repelled so many people on sight. Why people felt at liberty to pick me apart and wipe off …
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Among the Losses
My lamentations have shaken loose locusts.
They whir in the burned-out nave of my body.
In the shower, whole decades wash from my body.
A girl’s hairless limbs emerge naked from the spray.
A small city disappears in
the near-sighted dusk of a coastal winter.
Someone is walking home as I once did.
Someone is thinking as I did once
this is their neighborhood, their consolation.
Once I thought words could describe
In memory of Callie Barr, known in historical record
as caretaker of William Faulkner’s family
You may find her behind
Rowan Oak, a shadow
of fortress where then now
you find no real entry place.
Where then
I am no longer blind, but there was a time many years ago when I lost my vision. Next week I’ll see the eye doctor for my cataracts, and he’ll ask if my eyes were ever damaged. I don’t know …
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Reinhabitation was my dream. But in rural America there’s a chasm between what is real and what is myth.
I lived my entire life to arrive on the farm. Ten years ago this quiet, quiet place had everything I wanted. …
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I would not be who I am today were it not for the Bomb.
Had there not been a bomb, my biological father—a Manhattan Project physicist—would not have died in 1951 from radiation-induced cancer a month before my fourth birthday, …
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In the water, the rocks were a dozen colors, ochre to a bruised orange, purple to brick, dusky green to leaden blue, moss-tinged yellows—and all these eclipsed with flashes of sky ricocheting off the surface. These boulders and stones were …
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