The first twenty minutes in line outside the bathhouse sound like thunder. The Broncos have just played—maybe won—at Mile High Stadium, and if it weren’t for a block of four-story apartment buildings we ’d be looking down on the city …
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Features
When the sun goes down you move
horizontal you become everything
in the world at once rather than waking
like vertical where you obsess over
ascend or descend or whatever rain
at the edge of the building spit forth
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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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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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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