These images represent an old way of looking at what is painfully clear: Distances change, and the more they change, the more you have moved, regardless of where you stand.

“So, what’s the name of this place you plan on renovating?” Mr. Eldridge asked, glancing up from the desk.
“Hart’s Content,” Aaron Prescott replied, his voice unusually calm and devoid of enthusiasm. Inside, though, he felt a jittery uncertainty, masking the anxiety churning just beneath his composed exterior.
“And I’d call it a restoration, not just a renovation. The house is on its last foundations. I’d be surprised if it lasted another year like this.”
Eldridge eyed him inquisitively and leaned forward in his chair, hard-edged gaze unwavering.

Ever since I can remember, even now still, I have longed to feel like I belong—seen, understood, accepted and welcome as I am. Rarely happens. One might think I would have come to some understanding of this after all these years! But I think maybe I’m slowly beginning to finally get it.

Ce qui me suffit cependant, car mes misères,
le long temps et ma grandeur d’âme
me font trouver que tout est bien.

Tout est bien? Is it? Is all well?
Is it well in this translation?
“Well” instead of “endurance” or “submission,”
“resignation” or some such.

Derek was tired of having nothing to do. Once or twice, he had logged into an online game. What is the use of a game with lousy animation and no music? he was thinking, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes scurried across and out past the left edge of his screen.
There was nothing so very remarkable in that; but because Derek was so intensely bored, he became curious.

The boat docked at 2100. I stared beyond the eastern sky as the moon reflected off the silent sea. A look back down at the clipboard in my hands showed a list of every passenger on the cruise, all 37 of them. The Karnival Platinum Express had finally finished its maiden journey. I stood in front of the crowd of passengers and spoke.
“As I said prior, please form a line in an orderly fashion in alphabetical order. Starting with Madam Ashton and continuing onward.”
One of the passengers, the one who had beckoned me onto this craft, came sprinting towards my position the quickest she could. Her heels clicked in a chorus of despair.

What did it feel like to be the first?
emerged from the depths
to become tree-dweller and see the earth
curving beneath you, just to climb down
just to walk until exhaustion, over and over
until you’ve traveled too far to return

My skin is burning, the heat of the sun penetrating the top layer, leaving it red and itchy. Sweat trickles down my brow, across my forehead and into my eyes. Wiping it away with the back of my arm, I sit on my sleeping bag in the middle of the round, earthen pit. Miles away from the nearest town of Vermillion, South Dakota, high in the hills, without any distractions, I am grounded in the present. All I can do is feel.

I know it wasn’t my imagination. The man held a large sickle with a long handle in his hand. The handle, a sturdy block of wood on which the iron implement was mounted, was longer and bulkier than the usual sickle seen in the hands of women who harvest wheat or rice. Not many people from this posh South Delhi colony would have seen a woman sitting on her haunches to gather the harvest or heard its swish and smelled the freshly cut paddy.

A cheerful hold tone played in Arun’s apartment. It was not coming from the laptop. Not from the phone. Not from the small studio monitors on his desk. Not from the cheap Bluetooth speaker he had once bought during a sale and immediately regretted because it made bass sound like wet cardboard. It was just there, soft and patient, looping imperfectly under the morning sounds of Chennai: a pressure cooker from another flat, a scooter horn from the street, somebody dragging a plastic chair across tiled floor, a devotional song leaking through one wall as if someone else’s god had left the evening open and forgotten to close it.

Table Three/Two Diners

Chicken Lo Mein
Garlic Chicken (no mushroom)

The Husband

It wasn’t this restaurant,
another Chinese place
in a town hundreds

Indistinguishable thumping followed by crashing noises and wood splintering interrupted my nightly ritual of washing and drying dinner dishes. I dropped the tea towel, flew down the hall and up the stairs. The noise stopped. I stopped too, with my hand on the doorknob to my youngest son’s room, Schrodinger’s cat heavy in my mind, knowing that this was a box I had to open, but it could change everything.

Fog hovers over the treeless valley and the loch. The view is murky through the waves of the old glass pane, like a filter on a camera lens, turning the edges of everything a hazy shade of silver. There’s little daylight remaining. Still, up here the light stays long, and the moon is already out, waxing. Whistling wind sneaks through the small space between the old oak door and the jamb; the fire snaps in the stone hearth, wood smoke mixes with the earthy smell of the room.

Can ChatGPT make me a cup of tea?
Can AI give you a quick, gentle kiss goodbye?
Will Claude stay up all night talking
until our weary hearts have thawed?

Does Grok know your favorite house to walk by?

There used to be mourning doves outside my bedroom window, and over the years I watched generations of grey birds nest in the same planter pot perched on top of the baker’s rack on my patio, where it stood with its back against the glass separating it from the bedroom. The dawn brought with it motherly “coos” and the chirping of hungry hatchlings, and the sunlight would streak in through the bare blinds…

I got my first teaching job, of a sort, fifty years ago right after I finished my credentialing program. It was in a two-room schoolhouse on one of the small barrier islands off the Southeastern coast. About a hundred people lived there strewn across its eight square miles along narrow sand and oyster shell roads. Except for the woman who ran the general store/post office and drove the school van, the teacher couple, and me, all of the residents were descendants of escaped slaves.

Elephants—supposedly lurking,
menacing in a vast, dark corner, heavy
and dangerous, bringing some beastly
karma to punish arrogant humans, right?

That’s not it, not at all—everywhere,
everywhere the elephants, like dancing
Disney creatures almost, but more
restrained, more unperturbed—

When Tracy camped at the lake again the following summer, a zipped pocket of her jacket held a tiny silver pendant that was smaller than a dime and bore the whorled imprint of a baby-sized thumb.
Lola’s mother had explained this was a replica of her daughter’s thumbprint. Holding it, she had pressed her own thumb against the concentric ridges for a long moment.

When I first learned you were there,
that you had been there all along,
I felt that you had been watching me
and I wondered what I was doing when you arrived.

Did you, in your maternal stillness,
know that I dwelt beyond our mutual fence?

I sat in an antiseptic, white-walled conference room off the main lobby of Sellers & Cross for twenty minutes, fingering the fabric of my charcoal grey suit. It had been a month and a half since I’d seen a paycheck, and I needed to nail this interview. And not just for the money. For a bit of self-respect.
Having to work for a living blows. I never had to work that hard in college.

The ritual was known
As Dragging the Main

(Drag, to pass slowly or tediously),

Or the Main Drag; conducted
On Belmont Avenue,
Friday and Saturday nights.

We nap naked
on the side of the hill
after our picnic lunch,
sun-warmed and satisfied.
We wake at the same time,
suddenly, surrounded
by cows, heads bowed,

In my argument against nothingness
I get out of bed, assert myself
by going about my day.
My goal, besides making
myself presentable and reasonable enough
no one questions my choice