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Crossing Bordersexpand_moreWe boarded a ferry eager for foaming water rushing toward our feet.
They lived on the street, their mom a prostitute and heroin addict.
Fidel narrates the home video: See the women on the beach? Beauty.
Tonight these writers lower their eyes and silence their words.
His beginnings, his genesis as a writer, and the fateful connections between life and art.
If I had been blessed that afternoon, why did I lose my tongue?
We claw over earth, unfurling flowers, knit so close we know power.
Puppets share wine. A dog dressed in a red gown growls.
The places in between places are like countries themselves.
I seek these ghosts because they allow me to return home outside of time.
My grandfather has a space where the tip of his thumb should be.
He didn’t come to arrive, he came to go, and yet that didn’t matter.
Soon I will walk up those same back steps the police took by force.
Diane Kirsten Martin
Sometimes they revert to trickery, apple their venom with a smile.
Your face is a grain of rice, one small nothing on the world’s horizon.
Paharganj reels with beggars. Old women, boys, breast-feeding girls.
As Ilya sauntered back toward us, I saw a boy with nothing to lose.
Their hands were acting as airfoils, producing lift, not drag.
I was constantly being torn between belief and disbelief in his narrative.
You knelt down to kiss her, avoiding, of course, the wound at her brow.
Every step I’ve taken has been from one tongue to another.
Stories are places to live. We live in stories. What we are is stories.
My husband barely noticed, while I felt the sharp bite of her words.
“There’s got to be some way through this,” he says, “without losing her.”
The human heart is far more intricate than any single term can describe.
“Who you kiddin? There’s no middle class anymore, we’re all just poor.”
“Why, Ma? I don’t understand. I just don’t want you to be alone.”
we’ve walked the streets: candied apples on sticks, fish heads.
