The following letters were written on postage-paid “Tell Us About Your Visit” cards found in Wendy’s fast-food restaurant. They are excerpted from a series of more than 340 letters written over about a year’s time. December 14, 1996 I always feel like someone at Wendy’s is going to help me change. It’s so hard to […]
Poetry 64
Kyoko Uchida: Compulsory Figures
I want to ask you: in those classrooms still new to you, do they sit waiting, their hands folded clean, like rows of faceless daughters? In my dream my nails are trimmed and I hold the pen correctly. There are hundreds of us, all anxious for equations, answers to questions we do not know to […]
Kyoko Uchida: Snowprints
Gravity, too, grows thick with snow, accumulates inch by inch, but the sensation is of flying. I am moving over white space as it takes itself up, the storm lifting east and fast about my ankles, in my pockets where my hands are tucked with change. I’m running out of milk, out of time in […]
Kyoko Uchida: Driving Lessons
1. Following August across New Mexico borders into rain so fast grinding glass and asphalt, I lose the white markings where the lanes go, numbers on road signs, arrows. I can’t see the other cars or hear them. I’m negotiating windshield wipers, still learning to shift; weaving stupidly through Gallup, missing interchanges, overpasses, merging or […]
Julia Story: Winter in Iowa
I cheer myself up by creating a system for getting things done. I pull the pipe from your hand and fling it through the window. I explain to you the difference between helping and taking while you are unfolding yourself in my hand, an unfolding that takes place nightly. Every night we talk about things […]
Julia Story: Planting the Baby
Several children are walking in their swimming suits toward the red barn. A naked fat man sits on the roof. The sun is in patches and without sufficient legs. Nothing is rooted down, not these tall flowers, not this piece of paper in the wind. These children appear to touch the earth, but it is […]