I read things and they float away. I would rather stare at my own breasts. “Mind like a steel sieve,” my father would say.

I pass trucks carrying oil, milk, a load of onions (mostly) covered by a tarp. You’re hot, he says.

Photographs from Syria and Palestine.

Obviously, she says, I can’t come to the hill anymore. Don’t make that face! I’m not welcome anymore.

“Writing fiction is like controlled daydreaming, whereas writing nonfiction is more like putting together a complicated three-dimensional puzzle.”

Everybody gets old, Grandma always says. Everybody withers.

“That’s why I quit politics,” a teen says into his cellphone, juuling with his free hand.

The problem that afternoon was that when the woman seven months pregnant, in the throes of fentanyl addiction, began giving birth on the sidewalk

burn me some herbs
put on some tea (osmanthus oolong, please) and light the stove to slowly
let it steep