Long after you’ve forgotten someone’s voice, you can still remember the sound of their happiness or their sadness. You can feel it in your body.

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.

The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.

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.

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.

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.