Your father and I share names (government names)(I hope he’s well)(I hope you’re well)(You and I both always kept to the shadows but shined in the presence of prophecy)(Vroom Vroom)(T-tops off )(Quaker Street chasin’)( Johnny in the front)(I’m knee to chest behind the driver’s seat) (Peter tucked next to me)(The bass)(That fucking bass)(Rattling the inside …
Somewhere . . . Someone remembers it was the day we visited your mom at work. The old Montford unit. I’ve driven pass that sonuva’ bitch everyday ¡chingao! twice a day for twenty-plus seasons while the burnt sky arched flat, bright with angry love, and I never told y’all que tenía familia . . . …
You can’t blame the hounded pangolinfor coiling into herself. Stubborn artichoke crossed with a stout shop-vac, the animal seems engineered for battles epic, wretched. Instead, she defaults to pure defense—no teeth, just a spiral of bronze scales, as if roofers shingled a dreamy cat with scallop shells.The pangolin asks only solitary midnight suckling,a topsoil seething …
“Ntxawm.” The harsh monosyllabic sound startles you. It’s midsemester, and you still hesitate to answer when your professor says it—though you are the one who asked him to use this name. It should be normal in this setting: in this Hmong language class, full of other Hmong students, your name is the most ordinary one—but …
for my brother, David, who has been lucky enough to be loved by many I One of the unforeseen outcomes of my mother’s death in my senior year of college was the A-plus I earned on the final project in my Editing and Publishing class at the University of Nevada. The assignment was to self-publish …
They had been building a small radio at home, a very simple circuit that would draw the AM band into it and play voices and music through a pair of Bake-lite headphones—like those used in foxholes during World War I. The boy’s father had been taking vocational classes at the factory where he worked, to …
They called him Zaidy, although he was as unlikely to be a grandfather as a father. But the children flocked to him, when there were children. He had a way about him, a simplicity, that made him a bit childlike himself. He spoke clearly, with loud spaces between each word, as though he were always …
Your elderly father has mistaken his $4,000 hearing aid for a cashew and eaten it. This simple event contains multitudes: sorrow and entitlement and love and annoyance. It also contains the four separate appointments—assessment, hearing test, fitting, programming—you made and took him to in order to get the hearing aid in the first place. He’s …
You have a hunch that one of your coworkers at the small academic press is troubled. You have this uncanny ability to sniff out the troubled, and you feel comfortable only around them—the unabashedly troubled, the masochistically troubled, the adorably naive about the extent of their troubles. With a desk situated just behind your coworker’s, …
(Robert Louis Stevenson, “Where Go the Boats?”) Gray green is the river At the end of the world So I misremember What once I heardIn the Garden of Verses The lamps have been litThe blessings and the curses And all I cannot writeAll I cannot write Remains in the song The lamps I cannot lightAnd …