The Foam Keepers Sealed Jar
Carthage is still Carthage when I arrive the ordinary way: limestone glare that makes every shadow look guilty, the smell of fish guts and pitch, and a street argument that begins with the price of ba...
Continue readingIron Scraper Waiting for the Sun
Tenochtitlan still does what it always does to a newcomer: it arrives in the ears first. Before I saw the temples, I heard the slap of paddles and the hollow knock of wood against wood, like someone ...
Continue readingPadlocked Ledger Box by the Loading Bay
The Hague in July has a polite kind of heat. It doesn’t punch you in the face like Rome; it just settles into your shirt and waits. The air over the canals looks freshly washed, and the wind keeps try...
Continue readingRation Seal Wax Still Tasting of Brine
I went down to Portsmouth Harbour today the way one goes to a familiar place one does not quite trust: with my hands in my pockets, my eyes moving, and my story rehearsed in case anyone asked why I wa...
Continue readingThe Codex Mark for Dawn Weak Ankles
The first thing that tells me I am in the right century is the sound of water being used like a road. Canoes slide in and out of Tlatelolco’s canals before the sun is up, and they do it with the bore...
Continue readingHoney for the Court Day Throat
I arrived between Sippar and Kish in the usual Akkadian way: by following a road that is more suggestion than surface, past ditches that smell of wet clay and warm bitumen, until a gate guard decides ...
Continue readingMoon and Wave Whistle Over the Bread Stall
I came into Pune the way most things arrive here: pushed along by heat, habit, and someone else’s schedule. The road from the outskirts into the town was a strip of hard-packed dust edged with thorn a...
Continue readingBronze Token Between a Nine Year Olds Teeth
Stone wakes up earlier than people here. By the time the first ox-carts start grumbling along the causeway, the laterite blocks are already warm on the sun-facing edges, and the lotus finials on the t...
Continue readingInk Black Circles on the Arsenal Door
The harbor looks like it has studied the same maps as I have: low slate sky pressed down like a lid, grey water chopped into small, angry squares, and foreign observers on the heights lifting binocula...
Continue readingDrift Correction on the Chest Lid
The siren began, as it has every evening since I arrived near Dezful, with the weary confidence of something that knows no one can argue it into silence. The sound slid across the flat fields and into...
Continue reading