What does the world look like? What is the world? And what is Gaza? I had been trapped in it for all thirty-one years of my life, and had not left once.

In the beginning there must have been a word, though what it was I can’t recall. An introduction. Some pleasantry, banal. In the beginning was a word—and then another, and another. We talked and talked and talked.

If verb tense is language committing to time, it’s as though she’s refusing to commit to time. She has entered, instead, an elemental state, a kind of threshold space vibrating with emotion.

She always came to our house as the New Year approached. Alone—she never brought her daughters with her.

In elementary school I was cast as MLK for a short play on his life. I didn’t want the role, the pressure of being a focal point. I would’ve rather been a nondescript townsperson or even a tree.

There is a rift, in our troubled century, between imaginative writing and the various mainstream U.S. cultures.