When I was born I changed my mother’s hair (What happens to a body is a daughter’s fault). I drank salt water mixed by a propellor On the back of a boat, Ate grapefruit my grandfather bought accidentally, Took a 500 a month stipend And some bullet points, Pushed on the doors I...
my first is perhaps the most foreign, yet it is the one of home. Cantonese. She lights the path forward, a promise of return, a call of the motherland beckoning us on. She brings home wayward sailors paddling peeling kayaks packed with families, Canadian-born. Almost at the shore, upset, upstart, unsure, the...
It was the first Winter with you. We bought a Christmas tree, a real one, the type that my mother would never let me have as a child. Once we had lugged it from the store and positioned it in the corner of the dining...
you turn your head in the shower curve your neck, just so and let the water run down your cheek like a hand cupping your face a palm thrumming with the heartbeat of summer rain. this is the part where you forget float on steam and the promise of a...
After they fish the waterlogged corpse from its resting place at the bottom of the lake, they arrange it on a table like a funerary slab. They detach the metal hooks from the dredging net and unwrap the layers of net away from the cold...
The woman two seats down with her slim cigarette is laughing into her phone, somewhere a phonograph plays a twinkly tune—How’d that get in here?—and the train, which is a living machine, thunders north. It’ll take us to where we need to go. Right now,...