Amy wins a goldfish at the county fair.

My first encounter with before and after was in one of the fashion magazines my friends told me to subscribe to when I came to America.

He had lost his ticket, found it at the last minute, but then forgotten it at the hotel and had to turn around to pick it up, missing his plane by the time he made it back to the airport.

Slowly, his vernacular began to change.

I don’t think about things as / deeply as you

Something that the object never can take in, / an empty bucket that won’t carry me.

if I close my eyes and hear / the city is right there

Barley. Poppy. Then pomegranate. / Now front porch light.

I’m not even sure I believe / in boundaries

I like the dog; it looks / As if it’s just lying there

I heard the voice of reason / swerve bone-ward as it mouthed / the high hills of Art.

When we say we don’t recall or can’t explain, we don’t / mean to be evasive.

Not all writers feel fiction is the place to directly take stock of their social surroundings, no matter how out of hand things may be getting.

“In many instances, awareness of place is brief and unselfconscious, a fleeting moment (a flash of recognition, a trace of memory) that is swiftly replaced by awareness of something else.... But now and again, and sometimes without apparent cause, awareness is seized—arrested—and the place on which it settles becomes an object of spontaneous reflection and resonating sentiment.” —Keith Basso

Hannah and Addy were at it again, and as usual James was right in the middle.

What a blessing to be here, in the garden of my childhood.

Like life, a city requires imagination.