The Widow’s Loaf
The heat had already settled into the stones before midmorning, but it did so unevenly, like a tax collector with favorites. The open street by the cothon baked my sandals through. The shaded passage ...
Continue readingThe Useless Chip
A gray winter light came down the slopes this morning as if it had been strained through millet water. It lay flat on the mule backs, flashed dully on bayonets at the far bend, and turned the dust on ...
Continue readingThe Brass Clip
Snow had gone gray in the gutters by morning, not from romance but from coal, boots, and the patient grinding of Berlin under occupation. Kreuzberg was busy in the old way: women with string bags, men...
Continue readingThe Chipped Red Magnet
The city was still finding its voice after Sunday, and for the most part it had chosen boots. Boots on Sackville Street, boots at the corner of Abbey Street, boots under the dripping archways where me...
Continue readingThe Bowl With Three Iron Staples
The city wall at Datong still has the honest look of a military place: brick shoulders, hard parapets, gate towers with soot on the corners where signal fires have eaten the paint. It is January, and ...
Continue readingThe Plastic Sill Pots
Chicago in May still believes it is entitled to be April. The lake wind came down Madison Street with a wet palm and slapped everyone equally, which is one of the few civic services that has not yet b...
Continue readingThe Tin Tube At Her Waist
The first thing one notices about Bloemfontein is not the politics, though the war has made everyone here into an unwilling footnote to politics. It is the dust. It lies on the tent ropes like flour, ...
Continue readingThe Empty Kerosene Bottle
The first sound I heard after the siren stopped was a spoon scraping the bottom of a pot. That is usually how one knows the end of the world has been postponed: not by official announcement, but by a ...
Continue readingThe Childs Mud Drawing
Óc Eo in the hard rain has the smell of a kitchen floor after a river has been invited in and then insulted. The canals lie high against their banks, brown and muscular, nosing at mooring posts and th...
Continue readingThe Black Thumbprint In The Crust
The harbor at Happo looked, at first glance, like any busy Korean port of the late fifteenth century: gray tiled roofs stepping down toward the water, thatched sheds patched with old mats, fish basket...
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