Publications

One May day in nineteen seventy-two Arthur Bremer shot Wallace five times, a bullet lodging in his spine in such a way he’d never walk again. We know that Bremer was crazy, not a martyr for good. Here is madness where we crave reason, bald desire for fame where we’d prefer conviction. My father, twenty-five…

The wasps are dying in my son’s bedroom, and each morning I rush to collect them before he wakes and finds them on the floor. On my knees, cheek pressed to the thin woolen rug so I can see them at eye level, I pick them up by their wings, by a crooked leg, pinching…

Looking down from my second story porch I see the flowering quince they say will thrive in almost any soil. This one is no doubt dead, though its faithful branches reach up and outward, insulting the brittle dry sticks that pin the massive bush to fertile ground. Watery red flowers the color of diluted blood…

If one bright day you find yourself moving through the rooms of the Jeju folklore museum, you might pause at the domestic exhibits, wonder at the strange, closed basket as wide as a drum and as long as a yardstick. They call it “bamboo wife,” and carefully printed signs tell you that in warmer months,…