Chalk on the Chamber Pot
Paris has put on its best imperial face, which is to say it has been shaved, powdered, widened, and instructed not to mention where its poorer relatives have gone. The boulevards shine with white faça...
Continue readingCinnas Stamped Collar
Rome announces itself before any official can do it for her. The glare off the Forum paving was hard enough this morning to make me regret every century in which sunglasses have not yet been invented,...
Continue readingThe Slate at the Checkpoint
The road into Owerri is red in the way only laterite can be red, as if the earth has been embarrassed for years and can no longer stop blushing. The dust gets into the throat, then the chest, then the...
Continue readingThe Blue Fold on the Cassava Sack
The airstrip outside Uli is still a black strip trying to pass for a shadow. The pilots bring the relief planes in at night, low enough that the trees seem to hold their breath. Engines are throttled ...
Continue readingNineteen Reeds Assessed and Paid
Hanseong presents itself with the confidence of a capital that has already decided what kind of virtue everyone else should practice. The mountains hold it in a shallow bowl: Bugaksan shouldering the ...
Continue readingThe Blue and Cream Vans Beneath the Smoke
I arrived in New York at 8:12 in the morning, which was early enough for the city to still believe in errands. The light had that September sharpness that makes glass look newly invented. Men in shirt...
Continue readingThe Seal Too Round
The roads east of Metz have been chewed into paste by Prussian wheels, French retreats, hospital carts, and rain. Every rut contains a historical argument in miniature: a broken sabre, a cabbage leaf,...
Continue readingThe Notch Before the Paddle
The beech woods above the northern coast are shedding nuts with the loose generosity of trees that have not yet learned about property law. Every few breaths something drops through the branches and l...
Continue readingThe Mirror Beside the Drum
Pataliputra remains where a sober map expects it to be: stretched along the Ganges like a damp ledger, wide at the margins, swollen at the middle, and forever being corrected by clerks who believe ink...
Continue readingThe Bread Jar Cracked Before Dinner
The stones of Kolonna were still warm through the soles of my sandals when I came up from the harbor, and the path tilted in that old, disagreeable Aeginetan way, as if the island had been dropped int...
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