Genre: Essays

Initiation

I don’t remember what they called that night. Someone drove us to a house off campus. Someone blindfolded us. Someone lined us up around the perimeter of a pool. They made us practice fundamentals—low mark time (heel up, toes …

When I was young and a good listener, a man told me he had lost his soul. 

We sat on a strip of flattened grass outside the gas station I’d cranked my junker car into. I was waiting for a …

She takes the test on her birthday. 

“You’ll want a baby right away, won’t you?” he’d joked three months earlier, before their August wedding.

She’d demurred, but she knew she was lying. By November, there it is: a growth, a …

There are diamonds inside

Although the Leonid meteor shower is not a rare occurrence, it is rare that I will be awake to see it. The news has been reporting that the meteor shower is coming, that a certain province …

I arranged ten desks in a circle in preparation for students the first day of my undergraduate poetry workshop. It was fall 2011—my first semester teaching in the English department at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa. The students filed in, …

I’ve come to believe, after having written some myself, that every book worth half of what it’s printed on is about the true and vulgar ruination of a life. Tolstoy told me so and so did my therapist, a tall, …

Row! 

My first word.

My mother heard me say it in our brick house with blue shutters in Jacksonville, Florida. She had sung me the nursery rhyme many times, pretending to paddle a boat with her arms. Four pine …