Disappearances Have to Disappear
Bodies meant nothing to me. When they jammed into me on the metro or the bus, rather than tensing, pushing, or fighting for some tiny symbolic personal space I learned …
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The Rider’s Prayer
How does a human being, or an animal, become God? Through the spontaneous will of self-sacrifice, or through suffering. -Dominique Fournier Originally, the goal…
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Apocalypse Soon
The fog crept past the streetlight, swallowing the clouds of smoke we blew out, skinny or fat or from our noses in dragony tendrils.
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A Personal Geography of Fear
The KFC outside Beijing West Train Station. People sleeping arms akimbo on tables in the crush.
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Who Made this Grave
One day, in late October, my son and I left his Mexican preschool and wandered up the Calzada toward Morelia’s pink stone aqueduct.
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Touring the Revolution
he green hills from which the Zapatistas descended to take San Cristóbal nearly twenty years earlier looked wet and blurred outside the windows in…
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The Goat Slaughter
My first thought was, I never thought blood was really so red. It looked like red paint, a Hollywood prop, thick and gloopy and nearly fluorescent.
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A Letter to My Thirties
Dear Thirties,
You are a centrifugal force to be reckoned with: this, I concede from the outset.
The Morning Song
You are riding in the back of a pickup truck. You come face to face with…a chicken. It is fluorescent purple, and stuffed with candy.
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Proof of Extreme Hardship
was almost there, barreling along I-54 through the valleys where the New Mexican plateau drops and the land pours a deep, scarred red around…
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Acapulco Nights
I don’t like to say that I’ve been to Mexico. It’s not a lie – I have spent a small amount of time on Mexican soil.
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Down and Out in West Texas
We were checking in when a woman came storming out of her room to the desk and said, “There’s shit on them sheets.”
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