Avia Tadmor

The last time I saw my brother, he’d been dead
eighteen months and came as a ghost in the passenger seat,
his arm hanging out the window and whistling
an old boot camp song.

Merrie Snell

Maybe you know this one already.

I was a double adulterer. Meaning he was married, I was married. We were—all four of us—married. I like marriage.

Oliver de la Paz

1. Does your child flap his hands or other finer flapping?
Does he self-stimulate?

In ecstatic moments it is a kind of remembering
the body is the body. For example, these are arms
for grasping. These hands are for
holding and touching the known and unknown.
And how remarkable it all is—scintillate the way
wonder surges towards the filaments.

Joseph Pearson

“You come from the other side?” a young man later asks me, in the bar in Tangier.

On the flight from Lisbon to Morocco, I try to see where Europe ends and Africa begins. The coast must be somewhere below me, but it’s lost in the diffusion of clouds. I stare at the cabin wall opposite, where strange shapes, long trapezoids, morph; they’re projected from the late sun blazing to the south. I want to say “African sun,” but that rings false, like something said in the nineteenth century.