We May Sink and Settle

Someone told me even numbers of bamboo stalks are unlucky, so I bought another pot with three stalks, bringing my total to 9. I had 3, that was good, then 6, disaster, now back to 9. “What does that have to do with?”my coworker asked. I was carrying my bamboo. “I don’t know,” I said. […]

Get and Take

The woman was pleased that I was buying an umbrella. I had just splashed through Rockefeller Center, in three inches of rain, this made me laugh. Nothing was making me laugh at all, only actually wading in my sandals, running between the buildings there. “Once we sold almost every umbrella we had, to this whole […]

Strangers

When we came out of the bar in Iowa City, there were still twenty people on the other side of the street. They were holding signs and chanting in front of the Old Capitol. We had had nice cocktails at an upstairs bar. We had participated in a round of applause for the bartender called […]

Magritte

Magritte made me think about vocabulary. Magritte works in trunks (the human kind), tubes, clouds, wood, ball bearings, music, chess pieces, rocks. Blues and browns and blacks and greys. I work in animals, stained glass, shoulders and brown hair, houses, and glasses (the kind you drink out of). I work in fairy tales and Bible […]