Browse Topics
Travel
Mining The Lost Years
Even at the peak of my methamphetamine days, I would have had trouble talking for seven hours. I aim to please, however. A longing to please is both my weakness and my strength. It’s why I cook, why I write, why I take five years to get a sentence right, why I’m so goofily polite, why I reply to fan letters from prisoners.
December 2017
Grief Runs Untamed
In one hand the exiles hold a bundle / with a blanket, medicine, and a comb; / in the other, a door handle. / They attach it to every mountain and wall, / hoping the handle will conjure the door / that will open and let them in.
November 2017Sunbeams
April 2017All the problems we face in the United States today can be traced to an unenlightened immigration policy on the part of the American Indian.
On The Border
In 2015 more than a million refugees came to Europe seeking asylum. Most were fleeing the fighting in Syria and Iraq or escaping Taliban rule in Afghanistan. Bringing only what they could carry, many crossed the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece before continuing on to wealthier countries such as Germany and Sweden.
February 2017
The Wreck Up Ahead
After two decades of wandering the country by bus and living below the poverty line, I’d been unable to find whatever it was I was looking for. My adventures had not supplied me with the artistic depth and raw material for a sensational first novel. I’d bet every last chip on the literary roulette wheel, and the ball had chuckled and hopped around and landed on someone else’s number.
December 2016
At The Last Minute
Self-surrendering to prison, saving a life, wishing to have said “I don’t,” instead of, “I do”
September 2016
The Soul In A Body
is like an old Russian immigrant / looking out his apartment’s only window.
August 2016When They Came To Us
We went to sleep, and in the morning they were here. We saw them on our screens as they emerged from a grove of trees a hundred miles west of us. Their ship had crashed. It was made of a rose-gold metal and looked like a claw with a broken tip. Within hours the government had moved these beings — the “blues,” we eventually came to call them — to a holding station outside the nearest city. There we could watch them whenever we wanted, because of the cameras in each room.
August 2016
A Friend Of The Devil
Between the ages of four and nine I lived in a California desert community called Anza, a gathering of burnouts, hermits, and rejects where I had come with my mom and little brother, Eli, after my parents’ divorce.
April 2016
