We had chickens, mostly. I didn’t think I could milk a cow. Brett said “Sure you can,” so there was Sadie who let me duck under her. After, when I held the bucket in my arms, it was warm.

Mrs. Gillespie and my mother are having a glass of sherry in the sitting room and don’t want to be interrupted. “Come here,” Simon Gillespie whispers, and he takes my hand and leads me through the cool, carpeted passageway toward his mother’s bedroom.

Ed pretends he knows what it means when his brother says, “She hates the taste of it.” They are in the yard; Ricky is working on his motorcycle’s muffler and telling him about his new girlfriend.

I feel tricked. Sometimes it seems that you think you fell out of an elephant’s nose and that I’m just some old fool who happened to be there to catch you.

First Chance is a bar outside Kadena Airbase. It is, anti-ironically, the first bar one passes when walking away from Gate Two and down the yakitori vendor-, drunk-American-, and (at times) one-hundred-year-old-woman-urinating-on-the-curb[1]-lined street.

We were invited to Dublin to curate a robotic art show. Ireland was then the Celtic Tiger, having leaped from its position as one of the poorest nations in the EU, second only to Portugal.

I found on the sidewalk one day a catastrophe of insects. The legs of a walking stick braced under the cellophane wings of a cicada, but the body was closer to a beetle’s. Black eyes bulged on a bulldog head.

I met my first zebra the summer I worked at the Erie Zoo as a fill-in zookeeper. My duties included chopping apples and carrots for the elephant breakfast one week, thawing foul-smelling slabs of mystery meat for the lions a week later, and on the third week, throwing frozen mackerel across a wide moat to a pair of jaded polar bears.

What’s it like? If you’re not a woman writer aging, I can’t believe you’d be interested. Why would you want to read about difficulties that you think you’ll never have? Neck pain. Knee pain. Hip pain.

Let’s leave our living rooms for the wolves.

When the sky opens into whiteness

and comes down over us, why not go out into it?

The girls in the parking lot behind the Chevron have just

smoked their first cigarettes, and were not clumsy at it.

Each one assumed she would be: that she would fumble

with the lighter, struggle just to get the tip to flame,

then drag too deeply on the thing between her fingers.

for Rob K.

I want to align my spine

with yours, I want to get on all fours

and carry you places. I’d be enlightened

if I could with anybody, everybody

for Junot Díaz

Tune in, spoon into, this audio sputter, the din

of my judo-jumped heart—you who make me

no-doubt dizzy. My horizon’s dotted with tidbits and tactics

The biggest mistake of your life walks into a bar. Height bestows a certain specialness and he is just tall enough to qualify as special. As usual, he attracts more attention than you.

I should be there

Among the daffodils

After we arrive

Our trains turn into

Inside of Town Hall the townspeople are

having a meeting. What’s it to you, one of them asks

as I walk in and I say very little, smiling as they imagine

whether I mean what I say. Sitting in the corner

My own personal map of America on the back of the airplane seat

where the cartoon plane tells you where you’ve been and where

you’re going is, for some reason, in Spanish. So it reads Montes Apalaches.

Tonight over casual conversation,

words brought you up or out

from where I keep you,

and you were my stepmom again

and I was telling some of his family,

(paintings by Hikari Shimoda)

What is lost is lost for good reason. Things turn bizarre when the canvas of my feelings is

better off in front of the MacBook at home.

Every morning my father prayed on his knees

at the side of his marriage bed. He bowed

his head and poured his prayers into two loose fists

over his mouth. We watched in wonder