When he returned to his village after the Uprising was crushed, I see my father as a changed man. He has lost weight but is heavier somehow, his young eyes haunted and slightly devious. He is not given a hero’s welcome. His parents are furious with him for having thrown away his education, while a few of his brothers and sisters accuse him of delusions of grandeur. I see his mother going through his pockets in search of the revolver he carries, following him whenever he goes out at night. He loses her by visiting friends and slipping out the back door, then doubling back on himself to retrieve ..read more

When I lived near Washington, DC, there was a rash of attacks in which teenagers came up behind pedestrians and punched them in the head, hard, in an effort to knock them out. The assaults struck me as traumatic; the victims seemed so vulnerable. You can learn to take a punch—knees bent, chin tucked—but only if you can see it coming. Only once have I been hit: in my early twenties, wrong guy, arguing in the car on the way home from the diner. What sticks in memory isn’t the blow landing above my left ear, but the effects that followed: my teeth clacked together and a dizzy cloud momentarily re ..read more

There’s a sound I can’t place. Like the swoosh of tires on asphalt, the rustle of wind in the leaves, the fizzle of a dying bulb. It reminds me of the sound I heard after The Who concert in 1982 when my ears buzzed for days. This time, though, there’s been no rock concert, and it hasn’t been days; it’s been weeks. The sound accompanies me everywhere, like an auditory shadow. Sometimes it’s a high-pitched squeal, sometimes a hiss, sometimes a roar. At night it is so loud, waterfalls may as well be crashing over the headboard of my bed. When I search for the source of the sound, I can’t find it ..read more

“Parachute kid” is a broad term for underage students living in foreign countries alone while their parents stay in their home country. Parachute kid. As if I’m slicing through the skies alone, covered in sky-blue blotches of loneliness. I roll the word around on my tongue and scoff as I pour boiled water into my instant ramen—an authentic connection to my home country or something—with fresh green peppers for a gourmet Christmas feast, though three days late. I invite a random YouTube video to accompany my dinner: a Korean variety show with montages of California and its technicolor oceans, p ..read more

Predawn almost shadows, a racing heart, a knowing. I’ve almost missed, maybe have missed becoming the tooth fairy. Panic slides up my collarbone as I leap from the bed, throwing on my white robe. My fingers fumble to close it, concealing my nakedness. My third baby is seven and creates worlds out of ribbon, believes in mermaids and unicorns. I must not let this be the night her dreams collide with reality. As I stumble across the cold white floor of my attic bedroom, images fly like bats flapping frenzied wings, admonishing, taunting. My daughters at the kitchen table: mom, you’re going out ag ..read more

My eyes open expectantly at the crack of dawn. Soft rays like petals dance through thin white curtains, and my heart leaps as I spring from the bed. Picking berries is on my mind, a good reason to postpone other pleasures—the poem that needs polishing, the garden of squashes and turnip greens now teeming with weeds, and a morning jog in the woods. While I’m making coffee, blue jays, robins, and Carolina wrens lure me outside with their music, but it’s too early to hit the berry bushes that will be wet with dew. So, I summon all the discipline within and carry the coffee to my desk. I plant my ..read more

“A lake is a landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.” – Henry David Thoreau It is said that love never dies. I grew up on Lake Michigan. Lake Michigan dwells in the bedrock of my psyche. I will that when my body dies and returns to the earth, my lifelong bond with Lake Michigan endures, entwined with the universal energy of love. * The bedrock of Lake Michigan dates back 3.6 billion years to when earth was just 900 million years old. The lake was created by ancient glaciers. Its waters course 30 ..read more

The dream returns him: softness of his hands and lips, journey of his torso, gap in his teeth, his shining smile—the dream brings back S. whom I haven’t seen in years. And as I lie in bed, listening to rain pelt the roof, the shrubs, the tarp under which my current lover’s bike and mine rest like chummy, metallic beasts, scenes play through my mind: fog corseting a mountain, ocean steely and cold. His hand leading me under waterfall after waterfall. How he visited his family in Puerto Rico and swam in a bioluminescent bay, the staccato of joy in his voice as he told me about that glow. A Porti ..read more

There is a cemetery close to our apartment in Berlin, one you probably wouldn’t notice while hustling off to work, hidden behind a tall brick wall, enclosed on every side except for a heavy iron gate at the northwest corner. For a period of time, my infant son and I were there every morning from 9:25 to 10:15, clockwork, his cheek pressed against the center of my chest, the only place he’d nap for months. The walk to the cemetery wasn’t long, but it could be loud, city life blaring by in the form of ambulances, delivery trucks, and the German language, which, for a while, was a cacophony of vo ..read more

At first, I thought it was a joke. My husband had just returned from a weekend fishing trip to Grand Lake, Oklahoma. His first time there. He returned with no fish, six photos of a trailer that hadn’t been remodeled since 1962, and an all-encompassing desire to put a second loan on our mortgage. Todd smacked the photos down on our dining room table. I shuffled through them three times, searching for a glimmer of why. There were no photos of the lake or the trailer’s exterior. Each dim shot was set against a backdrop of dark walnut paneling and brown shag carpet. The bathroom’s Pepto Bismol pin ..read more