My home has always been Kerman, desert-city of Iran, heat ripples ascending from the asphalt. Above sunbaked clay walls, the cacti poked their green heads shyly. Walking back from middle school, I daydreamed about how if I was taller and more courageous, I could reach into Mrs. Habibi’s yard, our elderly neighbor, and snatch away…

You say, before we take the next step in our relationship, I should know there’s someone else. “A woman,” you say, like I’m unfamiliar with the term. “A woman who lives inside me.” And I think this means you have an unhealthy attachment to your mother because you say this while we’re in your bedroom.…

Step One: Have a baby. When the nurse offers skin to skin, say yes. Watch as the baby mewls and pulls her way along your torso. Marvel at how she homes in on your nipple, rubs her face across your breast until she finds purchase. Feel her need snake its way through you.  + Step…

 I wash the rice carefully, drag my fingertips through its grains until the cold water running through no longer drains milky. Then, I slide it into a bowl with two curls of cinnamon bark, steaming water fresh from a trembling kettle. It needs thirty minutes to soften, so I clean the kitchen in the meantime,…

One morning, I’m sucking down coffees in my kindergarten classroom when two men in suits stroll in.  “Nice room you got here,” one says. He looks like Steve Buscemi and has a similar kind of menace, a kind not backed up by physical size. The other one, no bigger, picks up a kid’s art project…

His name was Dozer, but I liked to call him Baby.  Baby, sit. Baby, shake. Baby, roll over. He never listened because he only knew his real name, since Daddy and Peter called him so, but I knew he liked Baby, too, because he’d look at me with his big brown eyes when I said…

Years of going to México with your dad, and y’all still haven’t found her. He packs up the truck without speaking, but shortly after you climb in, he calls you to his side.  “Salte de la troca, you need to get ready.” You’re little but old enough for your words to matter when crossing, old…

… that’s how Amy and Renaldo tricked the two of us, telling each of us that we were just going to the shooting range and never mentioning another person. They placed us together in a tree stand separate from them. We talked about how we loved shattering a clay pigeon mid-arc, but we couldn’t imagine…

She cuts the lights in the basement and strikes a match. Shadows on her hands and thorn scratches across her knuckles. She touches the flame to the wick of a vesper candle. A cigarette between her lips. She counts her husband’s steps on the floor above her. When it’s quiet, she imagines him at the…

What was left of our childhood could have fit in the jar of coffee we snatched from the tallest shelf in the kitchen so that we wouldn’t fall asleep. The kind of coffee Ali’s parents drank was torrefacto, which sounded like instant to us, so when Ali lined up our five glasses of milk on…

Before his death, my grandfather would repeat the story of the first time his grandfather, or my great-great-grandfather, met a white man. It was a story from the time when my family was still living in Manchuria before coming back to Korea. My great-great-grandfather’s name was Ugyeong. Ugyeong was the eldest son of Jinseong, and…

Sarah folds the dead student’s poems and carries them back to the creek the student had often written about. She holds them in her hands and then burns them and drops the flaming last corner into the water. Sometimes there really is nothing left. The few ashes extinguish when they hit the water. What once…