My father gave me these hands, fingers inch-wide and muscular like his, the same folds of skin like squinted eyes looking back at me whenever I wash my hands in the kitchen sink and remember him washing garden dirt off his, or helping my mother dry the dishes every night. These are his fingernails -- square, flat -- ten small mirrors I look into...Learn More

One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores, peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies. One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story told by our silent gestures moving behind windows. My face, your face, millions of faces in...Learn More

Someday compassion would demand I set myself free of my desire to recreate My father, indulge in my mother's losses Strangle lovers with words, forcing them To confess for me and take the blame Today was that day: I tossed them, sheet By sheet on the patio and gathered them Into a pyre. I wanted to let them go In a blaze, tiny white dwarfs...Learn More

because the winds are too strong, our Captain announces, his voice like an oracle coming through the loudspeakers of every lounge and hall, as if the ship itself were speaking. We're not going to Malta--an enchanting island country fifty miles from Sicily, according to the brochure of the tour we're not taking. But what if we did go to Malta? What...Learn More

Not a study or a den, but El Florida as my mother called it, a pretty name for the room with the prettiest view of the lipstick-red hibiscus puckered up against the windows, the tepid breeze laden with the brown-sugar scent of loquats drifting in from the yard. Not a sunroom, but where the sun both rose and set, all day the shadows of banana trees...Learn More

The sole cause of a man's unhappiness Is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room. --Pascal, Pensées The vias of Italy turn to memory with each turn And clack of the train's wheels, with every stitch Of track we leave behind, the duomos return again To my imagination, already imagining Paris-- A fantasy of lights and marble that may...Learn More

Para la santera, Esperanza, who makes me open new boxes of candles so she can pick out the red ones, the color of Chango, her protector spirit, and tutors me in the ways of all the spirits: Elegua, Ochun, Yemaya, Para Josie on welfare, who sells me her food stamps for cash because she can't buy cocoa butter soaps, Coca-Cola, or disposable diapers...Learn More