Explore

A widow is sort of a holy figure, while a divorcée is a tawdry one.

The peanut seller tore sheets out of paperback books to make the cones.

The distant past returned—what part of it, he could not decide.

For my vacation last summer, I visited the Bateer family in Xiwuqi.

Neither blood nor belonging accounted for my presence in Ghana.

Lebanon’s dreams of a homeland were fading with every rocket launch.

We caress the rough. Sensuous, delectable, and yet sorrowful.

They went to pray for the dead. It was important to shed some tears.

Lorenzo and me, we’d squat our own building. It was the new frontier.

For all the stories they’d concocted, the real one electrified them.

Is she dreaming of the rivers soft with codling in her hometown?

I grabbed him by the face and told him life only comes to a person once.

She favoured me with an even more viciously scornful “Don’t care!”

She is very rich. She will leave me everything when she dies, he says.

My desire to be in sync with him had nearly been my undoing.

She flicked a bit of citrus on her tongue. Her laugh was hard and high.

The guards ripped off Mara’s clothes, pinning her head against the wall.

The stones here carry the island’s low cry inside them. A landlocked grief.

He said he had come back to the prison because it was home.

I want to be bright scarves, soft rain, seabirds pecking at receipts.

From the flight deck Gray could see home, wherever that might be.

So, Ida, are you a Jew or a nudist? Do you believe in Hanukkah?

Devanand Simon was twenty-five when the bodies fell from the sky.

He longed only for Claire’s strange seriousness, her silent focus.

Alva knows the storm is coming. The ground is falling away.

Karen was, in that moment, nothing, emptiness. She was oblivion.

Love is trickling into Lady’s heart where usually there is only fear.

We are like a village here, separated from the rest of the world.

His fingers traveling through these notes can assuage, I think, all pain.