February at the V&A, manuscripts of Saadi’s Gulistan; quiet rubies on a dagger. You in this poem, in that roomSomewhere on all fours lookingfor a cuff link. Tracing your back; a stairwell of looselight—how I muddlethrough, like a dog in a coffeehouse—alert to sleep and sex, deploying wit to desiccatea zealot, plying tumblers of wine. …
A field of wheat sprouted on Beak Street, right below the elevated train tracks.Its stalks were tall and just about grazed the metal of the tracks, casting a shadow of wheat over the pavement.I liked the way the stalks stood, the look of them leaning against the wind.So I invited the field indoors, away from …
An old assassin finds himself out of jobs& is practicing dying. Every morning,he does his dishes, boils coffee, & when the sunis high, goes into a hole he dug in his backyard& stands still. In his dream, a teenage girlis writing a short story. She calls her protagonistBen, giving him a waistcoat so he can …
In a Baltimore hotel, we crouch on the floor,the thin space between two pitch-white queen beds. Mehendi stains a brownish red,I take care to touch nothing but skin. It occurs to me that this will be the first weddingI go to in America. How different this would be in the other land. There, at nine …
The women’s line snakeslike a weed, the men’s line a stub.Amma & I mutiny, jumpship. We are used to going where we do not belong.All we want is to make an offering,but we are asked to leave this queue. It has always been like this,the priest says, his incensed mundubunching around his waist. And I …
I hope children still learn to sing in rounds, the way we did in music class—not against our will,exactly, but maybe without enthusiasm. Makenew friends, began the first part, because youhad to learn life lessons even from the ornamentsof song, everything taught as a reflection ofhow we were expected to live. One is silver and …
Maybe I’m doing this wrong. Whilethe world skips from tongue to tongue, I’m stuck on the book that holds the oldest language I know, as if a kingkept me close: While everyone else abandoned monarchy, I satdown and stayed put. Even when I was mad atGod, I couldn’t give up the idiom of Hispeople, who …
The swifts speak to the sky likespies tapping out practice code, pushing theair away so the sun might paint their pale forms quinceand rose. They follow constellations of insects threaded amongthe slash pines and the early clouds, intricate and holy as theweavings of some celestial spider. These treesare tall enough to suggest their own kind …
My mother used to say that the gods were crying when it rained; my father said that they were pissing. That was in the early 2000s, when the news reported on the dangers of acid rain. Singaporeans fooled themselves into believing that the rain smelled sharp and sour, that it pockmarked the concrete sidewalks. Rain …
My friend Michael sends photos of his new flat in the old city. Twenty years on, Lisbon’s alleys are slick with renovation and rain, the stucco of the old squats livid in sunflower yellow. The stone floors are centuries old, but his place is dustless, with a real zebra-hide rug that he’s been dragging from …