On Lunar New Year, we dressed up and visited our Buddhist temple outside Dallas. Dad wore tight jeans, brown loafers, and a button-down shirt that had armani emblazoned on his left breast. Mom rocked Chanel sunglasses and a Gucci clutch. …
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All the Little Clocks Wind Down; She Kept All These Things and Pondered Them in Her Heart; Incantation; & The Morning Will Be Bright, and Wrong
All the Little Clocks Wind Down
Now the blackberries in the yard
have finished their work of fattening with juice.
They wanted to flower, wrote Rilke, but we
wanted to ripen. That meant being dark
and taking pains.
死的 / Dead
is what they call
a torn-up track
whose living rails I jump
to bed down in the wells
and feel the thud
hit every trestle
steam at dawn
like horses at
the track I trained
Dyke March, San Francisco
Do the best you can with your burden.
—Radclyffe Hall
I am reading The Well of Loneliness,
wounds dressed in language,
on loan from the library.
Outside, June blooms in Pride
I was living in a box room in a two up, two down in a northern town. Each day I would walk to work at the café, past a nun who pushed a mower across a tiny, withered strip of …
Read MoreBefore our company disappeared, we worked in an old three-story house in Shanghai. Every time I stepped on the aged floor it would make a squeaky, poignant sound as if the original owners’ ghosts were still wandering. I used to …
Read MoreThe dulse lay dry and ample on the flats beside the sea, and the tall girl’s mother had caught a tenday’s worth of mackerel, but the tall girl was still sad.
“What’s wrong?” asked the tall girl’s mother, holding a …
Read MoreIf ever he writes a memoir, it will reliably contain the falsehood that in 2019 he quit the United States for Côte d’Ivoire to sit out the coronavirus pandemic. Also, perhaps that he wished to elude a great—and imminent—North American …
Read MoreHere’s my question. How do we keep doing this—making art? My question can be understood in two ways: what keeps us alive in our art, on what do we draw, year after year and project after project, to keep doing …
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