The Brass Clip In My Sleeve
By midmorning the Vermilion Bird Avenue had warmed enough to soften the mud at its edges but not enough to dry the frost from the shaded walls. Chang’an in the tenth month always gives the body instru...
Continue readingThe Snapped Crossing Thread
The rain had stopped by the time I reached the Kali Besar, leaving Batavia polished in the least flattering sense. The canal wore a skin of oil, cabbage leaves, and mosquito breath. On one side stood ...
Continue readingThe Brass Clip Under My Arm
The first thing Nippur did this morning was grind barley under my sandals. Not symbolically. Literally. A porter’s sack had split near the street of the bakers, and for half a lane every footstep made...
Continue readingThe Dancers Ankles
Valencia keeps the sea hidden until it wants money from it. This morning the port wind came up through the streets carrying salt, coal smoke, stale fish, and the sour wet wool smell of uniforms that h...
Continue readingThe Raven Above Him
I arrived in Ismailia with a mouth full of dust and that peculiar canal air which makes breathing feel like one has been asked to inhale through a ledger. The town still carried the marks of the recen...
Continue readingThe Chipped Lobster Magnet
Harvard Square in September still knows how to smell like wet brick, coffee grounds, bike grease, and a paperback that has been handled by too many clever people. The morning had a thin humidity that ...
Continue readingThe Matchbox Mirror
Kermanshah in November has a cold that knows where the gaps are. It comes under the shop shutters first, then slides up the trouser legs, then settles in the hands as if hands were rented rooms and th...
Continue readingThe Matchstick Cage
By noon the heat had settled on Beijing like a wet quilt that no grandmother would admit was stored in the wrong cupboard. The avenue toward Tiananmen was full of bicycles, banners, thin young men wit...
Continue readingThe First Mouth
The first thing Zhangye gave me was dust in the teeth and a wall slogan that had been repainted so many times the old characters bulged beneath the new ones like bones under a thin blanket. The poplar...
Continue readingThe Little North Bend
I came into Pueblo Bonito looking for a replacement point for my awl, which had snapped in the last place where bone tools were cheap and conversation was expensive. This is the sort of errand that so...
Continue reading