Later she would pull

Later she would pull out bottle rockets and we’d listen to them scream and crack across the sky. There’d be no one to yell at us for making so much noise, and we’d tilt our heads back and howl at the moon.

f junk outside: rusted watering cans, bins of weed killer, a cracked bathtub, a few tireless Chevy

s. Those ears are worth more than your own, Daddy used to say. Farming was a hard business.

Mama was working late down at Diner 22,

l. I was spindly and freckled in way that made me look malnourished and uncared for.

Janey was easy to worship.

d there’s the summer sun on my back again,

d.”

on still cares,” I say to Mr. Chan.

hen, he asks

t’s getting too cold for me to sit out here every da

changes the topic and says

an stays silent for a while, l

oday, I ask Mr. Chan how his surgery went.

Laura rested her elbows on the wooden railing and leaned into the warm breeze. The day was grey still, steeped in mist. The great islands, weights of mounded rock, seemed to glide by on the surface of the water.

he local boys will cut it up for bait and souve

If she’d shared him with my father, he’d have known the sea as I do, he wouldn’t have lost his footing and slipped below the fetch. If she

zapping a living creature, just to see it scream

fear-filled as I will be when she leaves home.

 it’s too much to watch, the boy had said, the fish are hurting, but his father still took them by the tail in his great brown fist, lifted them over his head, and swung them down hard against the hood as if he were hammering a nail, each open mouth taking a last breath as it fell

Here is your story so far.

piece of pink, grilled salmon on top of spaghetti curled into a nest, a littl

how we cooked crab (kam heong, chilli, buttermilk, steamed), fish (steamed in ginger or superior soy sauce, fried, sweet and sour), prawns, squid,

But this painting made me remember the fields differently,

It is not very special: some rice fields and guava orchards, a bit of fishing, and some seafood restaurants. People sit at the jetty to watch the boats come home in the evenings because the beach is too rocky for backsides. I was glad to escape the restaurant that transformed my parents into two dried rice husks at the end of the day but that afternoon at the clinic, I wished for home and salt in the air.

I finally had my own air to breathe. I loved the days I had to myself: weekends, public ho

or hobbies or pets

My Mother Calls Her a Head-Case Convict

She gives me a cigarette, which hassles my lungs.

and I tell her that if I saw the kid in the cart I would take him, snatch him clean out of Walmart, even if his mother ran after me with a cop and a turkey

freeway runs between our tongues.

And he usually notices. 

ut here I am anyway, in the CVS on Perkins and Sixteenth,

a keening

and stepped on a lounger, and from there onto the wide wooden railing.

uneasily

We’ve been together a long time.”

nice,” she said reassuringly to Michel. “Really. This is good.”

Go to Halong Bay, everyone said, and so they almost did not.

When Dad goes in, he offers himself to the first swell and l

If she’d shared him with my father, he’d have known the sea as I do,

She’s as thin and cool as a whisper now.

Brian, who’s watching TV.

rian hates the smell of onions. I imagine eating the entire raw bulb to light his fuse – just enough for next door to hear

e exa