"Bekya." This is my call. It echoes through the streets.

love does not begin and end the way we think it does. love is a battle; love is a war; love is a growing up
      -James Baldwin

when i say
I love my family
what i mean
is i worship
the

Lightning struck my grandparents’ house five times in as many years.

My 11-year-old son thinks Imagine Dragons is the greatest band in the world. Maybe ever. I learn about his new passion in the most disturbing way.

to survive
tenacious teeth held their nerve

It’s funny: I don’t recall ever hearing music around you, not in the condo and certainly not in the trailer.

1. And what does it mean to witness yourself, on television, dying?

            a. I no longer watch the news.
            b. I’ve exhausted every mirror in my home searching for my

I didn’t have my brother Patrick’s phone number until after my parents had been in a car accident.

The bartender gives relationship advice in the alley behind the bar every Thursday night while the piano player does her thing on the baby grand.

Yes, my mother loved Pooh, but as far as I know her love was platonic.

Gender in the Long 19th Century ends at 4 p.m., which leaves enough time to raid the liquor store on Cowley Road. A and K and I go early, J and S join later.

The rats have eaten the grain again, and the men need a new solution. We’ve already exhausted the usual methods of dealing with rats: traps, prayers, and cats. Our town has many cats, but they simply

We’re sitting in a pit. It’s deep, well above our heads—a half-finished bunker, really, begun in the heady days when imagined snipers lurked behind every dune...

I know that I am going to die.

While sitting in the parking lot waiting for masked employee to bring your items out to your trunk you watch customers walk into the store. Count how many are wearing masks versus not. Watch them laughing.

so much of what I feel is strain and restraint, not
strength. I feel so much of my days are in want;

When I was a teenager, I got robbed a lot

During my first year of grad school, I learn how to kill rats. I work in a lab studying time perception, a cognitive function that’s not fully understood. We have to train new rats for every study.

The driver laughed when you couldn’t pronounce the name of your destination. It’s a cobblestoned European town the same as every other cobblestoned European town you’ve seen so far.

1.

And they all lived happily ever after. 

2.

Finishing work on the Saturday and heading to the pub because that’s what we always did. Tall Paul and small Paul and (ordinary) Paul, Ian, Bel,

after K Ming Chang

Late June, during the spider lily harvest,

            Meng Po sutures shut my skin

as soup marbles under. A broth that weathers

            me a body for the

In the mornings, we watch the wagons come in a procession, rolling down the streets in one thin line.

I’m supposed to be on my way to Timbuktu, not stuck here, listening to a man sing about the place

Vermont in the summer is a place I love.

Chacka

This Whole Foods smells of rot.
A lady holds half a jackfruit like a baby,
Pushes her fingers deep into the damp decay. 

We call jackfruit chacka back home (although who’s we?
I

Emptying the bottles, a simple task, was more fulfilling and more comprehensible than emptying Dad’s box of ashes 20 years ago.