A Second Life
They came running when they heard the crash in the ravine and found our car resting on its roof like a defeated beast, its doors swung wide its wheels still spinning, its horn still blearing. I screamed your name and… Read more ›
Category Archives: Places I’ve Been
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Terezin
The Elbe bore away their ashes and scoured clean the streets, the red earth by the fortress soaked up their blood, and they were gone, murdered, starved, deported, remembered only by the tidy baroque buildings groaning beneath their weight, the… Read more ›
Selva Negra
From our Hobbit housenestled betweenorchids and canna lillieswith a garden of bromeliadssprouting from its roof,you can hear the ghostly howlsof the monkeysthe bereft cries of the owlsthe electric trilling of the birdsthe honking of pink-tongued geeseas they strut up and… Read more ›
postcard from la finca
I’m writing from la finca where Frederico offers us another shot of Johnny Walker red manana, he says, you never know, you may be sick or dead you see those vultures watching from the trees they’re waiting the soup is almost… Read more ›
Chez Heshme
It seems like yesterday I was dining chez Heshme on a pigeon a student had brought in payment for his lessons served up in a piquant sauce on a bed of steaming couscous with the sheeps balls Heshme said would… Read more ›
Postcard from Rama Cay
On Rama Cay the breadfruit hangs so low you can pluck it from the porches of the hodge-podge houses planted on their pilings like egrets wading in the sea, strung up with lines of laundry like a loaded Christmas tree.… Read more ›
Postcard from Nicaragua
you can call me vos (tu in other parts) I am Arturo Puro Corazon a Latino trapped in a gringo’s body his legs too long for the taxis in Managua the knees crammed up to his eyeballs his feet too… Read more ›
Postcard from Little Corn
This is the land of happy dogs trailing wide-eyed children down the red paved sidewalks, past the pink and turquoise shops with their hand-painted signs, the coffee-colored women leaning out from the tortilla stands, the girls weaving bracelets, the tall… Read more ›
White Storks
They came in mid-autumn, sailing across the stark brown hills like white ghost-ships and settling on the tiled roofs of the villas by the school To the muezzin’s deep dismay, they built a nest atop the minaret and when… Read more ›
Las Nicas
Las nicas wear their beauty lightly, like a boa’s tatooed skin, like a tuna’s silver scales, moving their lithe bodies with a grace as natural as the swaying palms El Buen Pastor, they say, passed this way, disguised as… Read more ›