The sixteen-year-old Yitzel was getting restless in the long queue at the entrance to the Portuguese embassy in Berlin. It was so very hot and crowded in the noonday sun, and she felt a great thirst, a sweaty forehead, and an intense need to defecate. She and her mother Yolande had been waiting in line for over five hours, and Yitzel couldn’t understand why her mother was so bent on getting what she called a “visa” to Portugal or to any of its colonies. Yolande had explained that a “visa” was a special permission to travel to any part of the Portuguese empire, including colonies in both Africa and Asia, but Yitzel didn’t quite understand what the words “empire” or “colony” meant.

I was enthralled with a visit to Saguaro National Park in the spring. I had never seen the desert before and the flowers were breath-taking. I felt very lucky to bear witness.

As a child, I believed I was special. I grasped complex ideas quickly, asked questions about reality that my peers never considered, and felt destined for greatness.
But as I grew older, life had a way of dissolving those ideas. Not that I was unhappy—I had a great wife, great kids, joyful moments—but something was missing. A dull ache in my chest, a heaviness in my eyes—surfacing at odd moments, unbidden.

Home after a long, hard day at work, Pieter Bakkes took a quick shower, pulled on some civvies, turned on the television, switched on the news, grabbed the day’s newspaper from an end table, and plopped down on the couch in his family’s living room. When a commercial about Lion Lager came on, he hopped up and headed into the kitchen to get a cold bottle of the beer.

For fourteen nights
Unnerved and trembling
We place him in an unfamiliar bed
As alien as we are to this white-blond Asian boy,
Our sudden son
His scalp razored bald
Tenderly, we wonder, by his grieving birth-mother

“Do Not Disturb” — active
Yet a cunning code still pierces
Viciously, into cloud files — memory/hate/love
Restore automatically if:
Emotional thunderstorm detected

On Dana Street in North Berkeley, unhoused men and women huddled under a church awning in the morning downpour. I looked away, then forced myself to cross the street, raising my voice over the pounding rain.
“This weather is awful,” I said, shivering, water running under my collar, trying to sound casual, though I likely came across as what I was: guilty and entitled.

Tuesday night, a group of sicarios abducted Juan José Juárez, his wife, and two children in Colonia Los Duendes. Drugs and weapons were found in a bunker hidden behind the living room of the suburban house, tying Juárez to the Baja Cartel. Joaquín Velasco, a neighbor, is also missing.
“Joaquín went to play video games with Manuel, the youngest son,” María Velasco, Joaquín’s mother, explained. “He played over there all the time. We had no idea of Juan Manuel’s drug trafficking. We’d known them for years.”

The house always wins. Anyone who tells you differently has never played a game for money in their lives. You bet a small, relatively safe, amount and a win may come or it may not. Doesn’t matter to you because you only played sixty cents per game. So, you play again. Pull the slot. Roll the dice. Spin the wheel. Call for the next card.
But you lose.
Oh well, it’s only sixty cents. But now you’re in for a dollar twenty because you play again. Time passes and fifty tries later, you’re down thirty dollars. Not an awful lot but it was still money that could have gone into the gas tank. But you’re sure you’ll break even because sometimes you do win. Of course you do. That’s just how they get you to come back.

In Richmond, the trees are not where they should be. In their gangly adolescence, each was planted in a rectangular bed along the curb; situated 40 feet apart, the beds leave ample space for the canopies to spread, but measuring six-by-eight-foot, they are perhaps too small for the lower half. The roots of the oldest trees, older than the inhabitants who live indoors, have extended from their little box and into the sidewalks, creating fault lines for us to leap over.

Leo positioned the stylus gently on the vinyl record, delighting in the peculiar little crackle signifying the start. The inexpensive turntable was his first purchase when he arrived in New York, and it made his dorm room cozier. He swung his legs up on the bed and pillowed his hands behind his head. A piano, followed by a violin, playing “Yo Soy Maria” by Piazzolla, an Argentinian composer.

Mother took the photo
With a Kodak Brownie box-camera;
The black-plastic handle,
Gray knobs of the 1947 model.
In the square view-finder lens,
Upside down

I’ve spent weeks painting these walls. Spent weeks painting this shack, inside and out. Spent weeks, now, learning this place: this house, this garden, this street, this town. Already, I’ve memorised the view from the end of my road: a ravaged curve of mountainous coast crooked around the edge of the bay; a bay that opens out to the ocean; an ocean that pours into the southern hemisphere which makes up the bottom half of this godforsaken world.

Deep in the heart of the countryside
The tiny sturdy two-teacher school stood
Hidden between the tall trees and fading footsteps.

Many years ago, it finally closed its doors,
To all except for the traveling vagrants
Scurrying mice, spiders, wasps and black crows.

Mike was mean as a snake, except when she decided she wasn’t. Then she was sweet as pie. She could be an in-between kind of nice too, but that was mostly for waitresses and old ladies and neither of us ever found that very interesting. Mike was beautiful, stunning actually, and understood the leverage this gave her with both sexes, though it was the advantage she pressed least.

How could they have missed it? Surely there was
wetness and rising tides, juices that rampaged

in spring, stamens and carpels in the garden,
swelling and presenting. A whole paradisiacal world

A second weather alert convinces Mary Carruci, the executive director of Camp Rapture, to shine her flashlight at the rain pelting the river. Crossing a puddle in sneakers, shorts and a tank top, she tilts her umbrella toward the wind and heads from her office to the road, where lightning reveals the river’s steady flow. She follows the asphalt up to the bridge and stops breathing when a sheet of water rounds the bend and skirts the river’s surface.

Don’t go stalking my spirit
when I pass.

Let me fly so you can go on.

The end is the end, but it isn’t, too.

A faint waxing half moon of pink has risen
temporarily (I hope) where I gouged
my forehead on a painted hook screwed
into the door upon which to hang a holiday wreath

When I die, bury me in a bright red dress,
the colour of the blood that pushed through my veins
the fire of life and love’s caress.

When I die, bury me with red bright lipstick on,
to dilute the grayscale of mourning
brought by the passers-by.

My aunt had a dear friend named Clara Sandoval
But my mother did not approve of her at all.
One day when we were alone, momma said:
“I do not like that Clara Sandoval.”
She added “and I don’t want you to trust her either
No matter how much chocolate she brings you.”

In the last several months, I have been exploring minimalism as a way of projection and abstraction in my photography. The simplicity of minimalism reduces nature to its essence to reveal the underlying beauty of structure and form. These three images were made while hiking trails in the Sonoran Desert.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Salvador García was to remember that distant afternoon when he had witnessed the slaughter of the pipil natives and had said nothing. For years he had assuaged his conscience by telling himself it was the Indian rebels who had instigated the violence, that it was his obligation as a Colonel in the Salvadoran Army to quash the rebellion. After all, it was the pipil peoples who had provoked the two-day war by fiercely attacking the white landowners, burning down their homes and executing entire families in a frenzy of violence. What response did the Indian peasants expect, if not repression?

When you live in the desert, there is no sound sweeter than the gurgle of water—whether from a spring, a river, a pipe, a bottle, or even a 55-gallon water barrel like those we refill as volunteers with Humane Borders. It’s that deep-throated rolling sound that announces the flow of water from one place to another. A crisp sound, a cheerful woofling, a clear and noisy slurping that invites curiosity and excites desire. You are alive.