In Tokyo, there are no trash cans. At least, not in the way I once understood them. I moved here for work, and the first week I arrived, I searched for one the way a child might search for a familiar landmark in a strange city…something to tell me that the world was still operating by the same rules. But I found no bins. The sidewalks were immaculate, the subway gleamed, the surfaces looked freshly washed, and yet the small convenience store where I bought a rice ball had not

Here comes that buck again. Long flank, long shanks, big crown of antlers. Hooves cracking the ice-glazed early season snow in the yard, and on the other side of the grass there is a huddling confluence of doe, softly rendered into watercolor smudges of brown by frost on the window. Marcus from next door, also long bodied, long legged, hands that are twice the size of yours, asks hey, whatcha looking at?  You ask if he knows what a deer run is, how the stretch of land between

On the window ledge in my office, I keep a license plate hovering just out of direct eyesight. The license plate is near a container of holy dirt from Chimayó I’d collected on my last visit to the pilgrimage site in New Mexico, even though I still had enough dirt at home after I’d scrubbed it onto the back of my skull, trying to stop the inexplicable spasming on the back left quadrant of my head, spasms that sent me to the emergency room on my 39 th  birthday in a complete pa

The second floor is empty. The belly of the house thrums with guests, but on the second floor, the air is solid, untouched. Every door is locked. You walk towards the bathroom to the rhythm of a DJ no one remembers hiring. Kneel at the door. The sink is running. On the other side, you can hear the prayer of her breath. She says, “I ordered some flowers today. I hate online shopping, but that Mrs. Johnson’s place was closed.” “I never got any flowers.” “I didn’t say they were

If I wanted to find Yaya Clemen, I only had to follow the red. She marked the day the way fishermen track the tides, little commas of spit that browned at the edges on the concrete, on the wet market tiles, beside the bougainvillea, on the jeepney step where she would lift me by the armpits and plant me between sacks of rice and the lady with a basket of malunggay. Not blood, not really, though when I was small I swore it was, and the more they told me it was nganga, betel an