I haven’t had breakfast yet. Ramona said I got up too late. I would have settled for lunch, but it is already past lunch too. There is nothing in the fridge but spoiled onions and a Country Crock tub full of aging pineapple. It hasn’t been cut right so I hurt my teeth on the hard parts. Soft teeth, sensitive. That has always been my main problem, so I’m told. Too sensitive.

A driving rain laced with hail pelted the limo’s roof- making conversation difficult, and so provided a sanctuary of silence as the uniformed driver chauffeured the grieving family out of the city to the hillside cemetery.
Sophia’s husband Joe sat next to the driver, although there was more than enough room in the back, where her son Anthony and his wife Mina sat on either side of her, as if she needed to be propped up like some helpless old lady.

Tony saw it out of the corner of his eye, the official white envelope on the mat. He tried the breathing: slow in, pause, slow out, but it was no good. His chest was as tight as a rubber band.
Either he would want to meet Tony or not. And that was out of Tony’s hands. It should have been easy to pick up the letter, read it.

I’ve had this feeling that someone has been following me, not always the same person, but it’s as if someone or the other has been tracking me like a shadow, throwing furtive glances at me while trying to remain unnoticed, but all the same I have spotted them. Once, just as I looked back and saw a suspicious looking man, he scurried on to a side street. Today, I am sure, it’s that same man sitting to my right, a few benches away.

It was temperate in the sunshine, light fanned from the boughs of tall conifers onto a cream-coloured house, which was once home to a pair of wild cobras, skittling in and out of their hole under its porch. These days, the abbot was the only resident, visited by attendants instead of poisonous snakes. The building itself was unmoving while life grew around it.

Most nights, Izie sheds her clothes as soon as she comes home. She’d shut the door behind her, toss her handbag to a corner of the selfcon apartment and unbutton her suit while kicking off her shoes. Tonight she glances at me instead and marches towards the bathroom, swinging her handbag.

I couldn’t see. The night fog was thick, and I was driving too fast. My guts screamed at me to stop, but I was more frightened of slowing down, knowing that somewhere behind me they were racing to catch us.
I searched for the edge of the road, the line in the middle, anything that would keep me from going off into the dark forest.

Laurent left me in a friend’s garret for the afternoon. We’d moved out of the hotel and into the garret for a few days while the friend vacationed in Normandy and Laurent searched for more stable digs. The friend, a thin man with a thin moustache, seemed nice but a bit odd—many years later there’d be rumors about things that I’d rather not share.

While I stood in a wide-brim hat pondering the habits of Gladiolus “Kirov,” the call to a new life came. I was lost in gardener’s thoughts in the sunshine. As is often the case, I was busy feeling confronted by math as I guessed the number of inches between the “Stella de Oro” daylilies naturalized in my flowerbed. The “Kirovs” would nestle between them.

I first saw Hong Kong from the air, late into the night. It was February 6, 1997. As our plane descended into the vast constellation of varicolored lights, it seemed as if we were landing in a box of sparkling jewels, layers and layers of them. The contrast of dark night and myriad lights further heightened my sense of adventure, adding to the city’s already bold allure.

“I want them to see this,” Mom cries, her body booming through as she hits Dad with a lamp. He, no angel, drags her by the hair from the car where I coil arms around my sister at another violent time. These episodes ignite lifelong trauma. I am now sixty-eight.

As a child, I was strange. I put myself to bed early, drank from coffee mugs instead of bottles, and avoided eye contact at all costs. I hardly played with toys—or other kids for that matter—and spent hours in my room, staring at the wall. I counted my steps in increments of eight. I created sentences out of license plate letters.

I was hiding my lima beans under a flap of chicken skin when Dad told us the news.
I sensed that something was up when he arrived home from work later than usual, his face red and blotchy, an aroma of whiskey, cigarettes, and fryer oil drifting from the blazer he flung over the edge of the couch where I sat watching MTV.

A search for the Garden of Eden had been considered from time to time but the collective will to find it had never reached a sufficient level to justify the effort. There were some, however, who wished to proceed and there was no shortage of scientists, historians and theologians who entertained the possibility that the Garden, or what remained of it, existed somewhere in the world.

Laura bustled around the kitchen, lighting the candles, rearranging the silverware and checking on the roast in the oven. She and Tim were celebrating their third wedding anniversary and she wanted everything to be just right. He was running a little late; he should have been home a while ago. She placed his carefully wrapped present next to his plate and poured the wine.

The first time I feared my life would end at the hands of a white person was in late summer of the year of our lord nineteen hundred and fourteen.
I was fourteen, terrified, skinny, long-legged with brown skin, and curled up on the wooden floor of the hallway in building Number Four at an industrial boarding school for wayward girls.

Jasper wasn’t the sort of man who liked to share his food, never had been. This did not sit well with women. They always wanted “just a bite” of this and “a taste” of that and sometimes, he knew, they wanted to share an entrée to stay on their diets even though afterwards, they’d order a rich dessert and he would go home hungry. But these are lessons you learn, especially over the course of a sixteen-year marriage.

Shadrach, Ohio, remembers my family. Remembers me. On the rare occasions when I come back to visit the museum that once was our house, more than one hand has found its way to my shoulder to pat comfort. It’s a rhythm I’ve known since I was five years old. Since the day my little sister Dorothy was born.
She wasn’t the first baby born with Mylar’s Syndrome, not by a long shot.

The afternoon sun burned a seal on the floor, the single hung window casting a parallelogram shadow onto the cream vinyl sheets near the foot of Laifa’s hospital bed. A crosshatch of metal bars and the grid pattern of the mosquito net framed the window’s outline, an otherworldly manhole Laifa could fall through into an eternity of light where she’d float weightless in the air as if in space. At peace.

As for the darkness of eternity
a little light by your bed
might do as the wind
flings itself against your wall
weathering all away

I can’t quite make normal work for me.
The angle, the navigating, the placement.
I’ve lost the how to manual for contorting
my body to use makeshift MacGyver skills
and filthy underbrush to survive on.
I’m not sure how it happened.

I see the autumn leaves falling. I ponder chance as they release.
Watch as they glide, then gently come to rest. A shading life,
clung to a branch, in the final moments breaking free.

Starved for art,
we were made for poetry;
we are mad for poetry.

Study this hunger;
learn how to feed it.

250 million years ago
an ancient cephalopod
once stretched upon granite
and Time remembers
a tail dragging in thirsty sand.

Meanwhile, She is getting away from us:
a child no one sees