Articles

1. This is how the story normally goes: a young bride, a virgin, is sewing outside her humble home when the Angel of the Lord appears and says: Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.

The summer our parents tried to split up, my sister Teresa drank half a bottle of bleach. The year before that, she’d climbed to the top of the monkey bars and jumped,

My island has been awake for hours by the time I, in my Midwestern suburb, rise and hunch over a screen to wait for news. It is May 31, 2014, and on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Cyprus is having its very first Gay Pride Parade.

Out of the daily feedings and training and classes and animal-visitor encounters of a zoo, there is little that makes it into the news.

Okmulgee, OK. “Okay?” A leather sofa. Warm air. I laugh as I throw toys behind the sofa to investigate. Grandpa’s cat, Chang, can fit underneath.

I surface aspirate-blue, the mother-of-pearl edging on a button blanket, cedar strips steamed then bound, a bentwood box cupping tidal foods:

I stay with my mother in the waiting room
of the Juneau Public Health Center

to see about an abortion. The last night
they made love, my father anchored

his fingers in the sable-thick
of my mother’s hair and made me,

At a bar in Kowloon, Hong Kong, 2011,
a boy in a business suit asks me,
“What’s your citizenship?” and I wonder
if this is the pick-up line of the moment,

When I was a kid, I dreamt of being a goddess
atop a white piano, wearing angel wings straight out
of the Victoria’s Secret catalog of my childhood
imagination,

All there is to do is to say it
confused, say it ugly to not-there-ness,
because that’s what I need sometimes: