as i descend through the clouds over rakovnik, i see the beautiful city laid out before me like a banquet of setting suns. the iodine lights of ten thousand streetlamps below me like candles, like the sun shining through bullet holes in a vast steel sheet, like a...
Dear Mom, Hi! I keep wanting to call you, but this is easier. I’m writing from Laugarvatn, Iceland. The wind has been shaking my wooden, low-gabled room with its many windows for three non-consecutive days. Yesterday it took a break and let me catch up on sleep. It...
Photo: “The Green Line in Nicosia (Cyprus)” by Marco Fieber is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 I would like to tell you about the kafenion, about the cat that lived there, and the cheese rinds I fed it. About the coffee-shop owner who was hit by a car, and the...
We catch our breath near the beheaded buddha at the temple’s summit. Beyond us, the crater of Mt. Merapi breaks through a ring of clouds, while among the bell-shaped stupas, the gap-toothed man snaps photos of a young couple. Sunlight rises over the central stupa’s...
Photo by Mk2010, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Father and I are on the upper deck of the Star Ferry, crossing Victoria Harbor, approaching the cinderblock skyline of Hong Kong Island. We’re coated in sweat from the humidity. I understand why Mother decided to...
Photo by ParentingPatch, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons A woman sits down beside you in Gallery 114. “Do you know,” she says, “these were installed just as my mother was dying. “As she got sick, got worse, got that terrible treatment.” You look at her and...
