all the mothers at the funeral of the boy’s mother are looking at the boy. the boy is very young and does not quite know yet why he has to be there. all the fathers at the funeral are looking at the father of the boy whose eyes roll around the pews, windows, and frescos where the sun rays' glow in g...

I don’t admit about things that can detonate the safe haven I have built since that long ago afternoon, I looked up to the Ethiopian sky, and saw the Sun with a love-at-first-sight muse. You see, what I never saw, the limbs of life I always overlooked, have given me a feral eye that now notices ever...

An Ethiopian novel written in the sixties, reads Aleweledim, and translates to "I refuse to be born". I remember it as accurately as a face in a water appears, correctly and incorrectly. The fetus tells his destitute mother a woman of the streets and no means, Why would he come into a world devoid ...

I might forget this lightness carrying me beneath my feet where I bootstrap my innocence. I am walking under the Sun with my excitement beside me, mixing snow marks into shapes of unclaimed men, women, dogs, and squirrels. The coffee shop is uncrowded so I settle into my seat, and think about snow f...

I am sitting at a weathered picnic table, at my retired firefighter friend’s farm. A moment ago, a tractor grunted up, and the chickens and roosters ran to me as if I could defend them from the industrial monster. The shaggy dog bumbled past—unbothered, and the tractor slurped its lament around the ...

If a gardener pays for every flower he tenders, his children have no bread for breakfast. If a queen sleeps in her garden, The city will be without a star. And the queen knows the gardener, like a shimmering jewel at the bottom of her window, where her cat sits every night. Is love the impossible ai...