Articles

There was a man that night on the lovers’ moon
walking as if on water

THERE IS A STORY I have been trying to tell. At first I began with a metaphor, but it never felt right. I rewrote this metaphor a dozen times or more, unwilling to let it go. The metaphor was both premonition and denial; it was an unconscious attempt to disguise the collapse of my marriage,…

Why did Jesus make the nights here so beautiful, soft to the touch? And did I really have a substitute explanation to offer my son?

the world’s ripe belly open in its bloodless way

For us Iranians, carpets are not just objects but a sacred part of family existence: We are born, live, and die on carpets.

They had left about forty crows
in the conference room, as a test.

An artist’s solitary toil often elicits comparison with the life of a cloistered monk, as both vocations navigate between isolation and communion.

It’s only a blast of gunpowder that loves
to say its own last name

Love is
a dying into only.

As I watched him settle into his seat, I felt the tension in his body almost as if it were my own, as if in his taut shoulders and straight spine he was holding himself rigid against the enormity of desire pressing down on him, as I had at his age.