Articles

This much is certain
to me: Prayer ends up
somewhere, like the bright
death throes of a star

When the day of commencement came, I treated it like any other day.

Blasphemers in taverns slurred sacred hymns and the lame lay bellowing on the steps to shrines where beggars repented prideful sins.

Could she
make an excuse and stay home this year?
Get out of playing happy, the happy family?

Triangles have a special place in her abstract work, sometimes commenting on the politics of space, such as geodesy and the Orientalist map-making undertaken by colonial powers.

The story of my family was spread out there every day. It is the gathering of family that drives the paintings, and my life.

Two years after the Pot Peak fire
the color returns to the wheat.

Cliff walls ascending, seagulls
ascending, skyward and calling out, circling over
the schools of herring and diving again to the sea.

I remember her first cries, high-pitched and alien, as if coming from another world into this one, into all this mystery and peril.

But art aspires—art is only human.