Numismatic
I was a child once, and had no concern for cash but did, and still do, have a compulsion towards coins. The curve, the jangle, the shine. A coin is kind of magic, how any circle charms the human eye: halo, hollow, sun. We scraped circles on rocks before we could cobble together tools from...
Carolina/Tennessee
It’s true, I find signs because I look for them, but there are more carcasses roadside, half-baked by the sun, more cops, all gunmetal gray and flashing blue lights—stop, slow down—so I park under a live oak outside an abandoned gas station just west of Florence, South Carolina, and let smoke drip from between my...
The Boat People
The women here put on their makeup like rust-proofing. Preschoolers toddle through the trailer park mud puddles, splashing and pimp-cussing. Teenage girls in sweat pants and ratty NASCAR t-shirts smoke over parked strollers, hips set at a permanent baby-propping cant. The afternoons oxidize like trailer tin. Still, there are boyfriends, and emotions worth screaming over,...
Cornelia Street
The first time I saw Cornelia was at a dance, at the Cultural Center at No. 3 where folk music was playing and night moths gathered on trumpets as if around a street lamp in the dark. Children knew by heart the precise number of cobblestones in the pavement. And Cornelia had a little metal...
Green Plastic Buckets
There’s a particular tint to the plastic buckets in Calcutta that you can’t find anywhere else in the country. A green plastic bucket in Calcutta is not the same green that you will find in Delhi or Bombay or even Madras, close as the South Indians are to the Bengalis, brothers in intellect under the...
Slide
The wrinkles on her elbow are like the circles in a tree stump, telling her age to anyone who knows the formula. I watched her from two seats behind on the bus. Her nostrils were big. I wanted to climb into one of them and get sucked up into her brain with a hard tugging...
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