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I hear myself giving advice in my father’s voice: Take the emotion out.

It takes a strong woman to make any sort of success in the West.

Ma didn’t believe in slapping. It was what common people did.

I hold on to the shape of a star the way my aunts hold on to Jesus’s gown.

Sing so dogs bark, oxen bolt. Sing so a girl walks out on her lover.

The past, you hear it, the small hours, sucked down the undertow.

There would be no one to live for; she would live for herself.

He was trying to seduce me with his history, which was mine as well.

Take this man, Stepan. His deep mellow voice soars in my heart.

The people flocked to witness the execution of Ja’afar and his kinsmen.

At a red light he touches his cheek. The stubbly skin is sensitive, febrile.

Flies at our dinner—Won’t eat much sings the tiny ghost of my mother.

No parent has yet been born who can save a child from childhood.

Men like me and my brothers filmed what we planted for proof we existed.

Her sentiments maudlin, malaise dripped like a fever from her pores.

Somebody would be a lot happier if she were more like her mother.

In the backyard I submerge myself in a bathtub of soil, soak with the hose.

He was ready to move on, to touch his patients, to cut them open.

Who was responsible for my father not living up to expectations?

Fatwas condoned our arrest for the rouged contours of our lips.

His mother wasn’t there to meet him at his stop. She never was.

They are glorious pumpkin-skinned messengers. I hate them.

I could go in for some pie why the hell not, there’s so little time.

And that girls came to his house all the time, cheap girls from the docks.

Her family was still poor and hungry and scared.

Like every thing made, the photograph intimates a view.

My brother stealing all the lightbulbs, my parents live without light.

My mother is queen of buttons. She shows off the prized ones.

Is anybody out there? Nobody answered, and I felt archaic as prayer.