I found a message in a bottle. The bottle was buried, only the cork visible, so I had to dig it out, wondering how it had come so far inland. But then, who says every bottle with a message has to be thrown into an ocean? The message itself was indecipherable. That there is a [...]
I was taught that poems were words made to remember. So I went into a café and wrote down the most important things I could think of. I wrote pages and pages of the stuff. And I felt like a genius until I showed it to my friends. And that’s how I proved that my [...]
A hundred years ago a clock stopped and its hands show the same hour and minute to the city forever. In the back of a stone house there is a crack in the window and a plaque beneath it reads the hour and minute of the damage. The moment you fall in love. They say [...]
I have not yet learned how to sleep through the call to prayer. It carries over the rooftops, ten thousand loudspeakers just out of sync, a rondo of monophonic voices that sweeps me into the seventh century. The call is both far and close; it is, like the Southern Cross, a whisper from another time. [...]
I want to go crazy in the desert with you. I want to stumble ahead, our water cans are empty. I feel the grit of the sand in my teeth. I want us to continue, long after we should have died, until we find an alien landscape, a place of red lakes and stone arches, [...]
I haven’t been able to write. I have ideas, ideas are never the problem. Rather, ideas are exactly the problem: they keep me awake at night, sabotage any attempt to capture them, turn against me on the page. So I printed my old stories and cut them into pieces. I shuffled the small ones and [...]
Your window faced mine that summer, and every night we passed each other notes across the narrow alley. We were four stories above what used to be a canal. The buildings still lean in, as if they would crash together without the buttresses. The first time I saw you, you were tossing origami flowers, doves, [...]
The decade has changed us. We ride the subway like zombies, staring into space while our earplugs sing us songs we know by heart. Back home, back online, we flip through the avatars of people we have not seen in years, if ever. In text messages, in status updates, we pretend to be profound, represent [...]
For just this night, I want us to forget the facts we know. I want the clock to stretch twelve midnight to thirteen, the wind to blow from a direction our compass and our plumb line cannot find. Halloween was delivered to us, a relic in a box of ash. We burned the witches to [...]
I have seen you many times. We held eye contact as the elevator closed, you mouthed a word I could not read through the window of a bus, dared me to approach from behind a fortress of your friends. This is how a leaf flickers in a constant breeze, its flickering, also, cannot be disturbed. [...]