Few things come back to me with this much clarity.

I am ten. I walk by the shore just outside Kōzu with my two brothers, twins, and five years older than me. It is a cold December day, a blustery wind harassing the waves, pushing them up against the shore in riotous piles. Across the bay to the north Mount Fuji rises up, twenty miles away, perhaps thirty – I am too young to know distances. Its white cap is barely distinguishable from the heavy clouds, only a certain solidity marking where its sweeping sides begin and the grey mist ends.

My desire for there to be an afterlife

equals my conviction there isn’t one,

sing as one may, alone or in unison,

“When we all get to heaven.”

A heaven less screwed up than earth

where we long, and love and hurt.

An eternal present from which we look

down at the past; everyone has one

and everyone’s isn’t exactly alike.

January 1940

Northeastern Finland

The Winter War -- Finland versus the Soviet Union

The tundra clearing rang with the sound of bullets. It was almost dusk now, on the third day of fighting, and snow was still falling. It covered the ground in layers and sprayed upwards in a cloud of white whenever a stray bullet punctured the dirt underneath. The riflemen had begun taking shifts to shovel the snow out of the trenches, and, like the battle itself, it was never-ending labor. Every shovelful that was flung out and upwards by frosty fingertips was soon replaced with fresh precipitation.

Dear Kafka,

It’s a great pity knowing that you died thinking you were a failure. You were my very first love. Now

don’t scoff at me from the other world. Your dreams are now my dreams or I wish to make them mine. I

desperately want to know what you felt when you wrote ‘Letters to Melina’. Was it joy? Was it despair?

Was it jealousy? Or was it the feeling of an unrequited love? You really do live up to your name. Don’t

you? You are a crow who likes to get lost in the shimmery sadness and in the dreams of others. For once

The day he died—February 3, 1959—was “The Day the Music Died,” or so claimed Don McLean in his eponymous hit record. But The Big Bopper, born

Jiles

Perry

Richardson

Jr.

did not lead a life that was the stuff of feature films, unlike the legends of the other passengers on that star-marked airplane: Buddy Holly, Richie Valens.

My Darling Izzie,

This city is so different from the West,

where the land tints

and weathers the people.

Or rather, everyone here is shaped

by a land somewhere else.

In that sense, I resemble the New Yorkers.

I start to view Nebraska

differently. The faces I grew up with

begin to soften and meld

into characters.

Wrecked on opium, Thomas DeQuincey

sees Coleridge’s foot as a goldfish

in an aquarium missing its walls.

The young Alfred de Musset is touching

George Sand’s left nipple

with a sable watercolor brush.

“Tu m’aimes?” he asks her.

“Et toi?” She turns her head

and blows cigar smoke in the face

of the Paris dawn.

The woman in the house across the street decides to leave. A man walks out of a bar and disappears. In California, half a million people all look up at the sky, and find that there is nothing out of the ordinary.

On the shoulder of a highway two brothers kiss in the back of a car while their father sleeps in the front seat. Another man in another car, going forty miles an hour in a one hundred-mile zone, shakes his head at something said on the radio. A house in the middle of nowhere, recently foreclosed: the wallpaper in the living room slowly peels away.

We have school tomorrow, Kyle.

I’m sorry to take you back to Wichita

from your family in Chicago. I made Emmalie

take a picture of you and Agnes sleeping

in the backseat. I’ve just smashed a monarch

on 36 highway, and the Sun is fleeting.

1.

abe, it’s been a century and a half

since we last talked. how the heck are ya?

my mom got rid of the bunk beds

when i was 10. i didn’t marry that girl

i liked in the first grade. feelin’ okay.

I’ve been to the Lincoln Memorial quite a few times with the childish, stubborn understanding that Abe was buried there, that a memorial required an actual corpse to be complete, something to mourn beyond a field of marble embossments, but it came to my attention, really through a logical progression where I first noted the openness of the space, my pure and complete map of every portico, every chamber and the severity of its molding, like a mausoleum, a place designed to eventually fall into disrepair, to fall in ruin against the summer sun, heavy rain threatening the indifference of its tennessee marble;

When I was a girl, my grandmother told me a Devi saved her life during a four-story suicide leap the year China went Red. Me on her lap, she told how she toed the building ledge, staring out over the network of alleyways smothered in smoke and screams.

Watching birds crisscross the solemn sun

Quivered in the reflection of gentled waves.

Far away cobalt mountains stood hushed and frozen.

Mellow ivy, cool grass, beneath the feet, wet sand.

Everything around me shimmered

through my irises—lights, colors, a dun sky

seamlessly curved into the earth, neon attires

strewn on wet tracks, outlines

of shadows scudding across faces, but if

some faces reminded of other faces

I would awake, suddenly discovering myself

against the immense expanse

of a city I could escape only with my soul.

The fountains are quiet, gardens brown,

concubines choreograph the palace

and are directed by eunuchs.

The best go off on pilgrimage

while the arcades cough up

cobwebs instead of silks in every color.

How many levels of nostalgia are you on?

I know, counting seems to take the fun out of it,

Yet, there are limits and there are levels,

Again, how high and how wide

Is your painful longing for the past right now?

I’m so sorry your celestial minds

Were deemed unworthy of the spotlight we’ve dedicated to the man who would

Never been known if you were not the first bloom

And stories written by

Ivory powders

And male egotism,

Half-hearted “I love my wife when she obeys me” sagas--arrogance and bigotry

And a son. We know he loved his mother.

Mourned her in the myths where he caused her death.

Cherished her in the ones where she didn’t die.

Heard her when she called out Siddhartha, Siddhartha,

come sit next to me and listen to my voice. Siddhartha,

love is everything. You must love. You must love

your mother tells you to drench yourself in every piece of clothing you own and you do not want

to be a jungli so you wrap your torso in kurtas and salwar kameezes and layer your long legs in

tight churidars and you want to bring your ghagras but they are too heavy to run in so you leave

90 Days

to flee from

the gunshots,

the crimes,

the threats.