Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.

Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.

I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God. But all I achieved was awkward shrieking. Not even the pure shriek of a reed in the rain.

Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.

I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.

No one is born just once. If you're lucky, you'll emerge again in someone's arms; or unlucky, wake when the long tail of terror brushes the inside of your skull.

Like other ghosts, she whispers; not for me to join her, but so that, when I'm close enough, she can push me back into the world.