Magnificent Octopus

Sensei continued to stare at my arm, all the way down to my palm. His eyes on my palm, he murmured something about me not having any wit lin...

Our love was so strong that it felt like a presence in the communal apartment, as if it were another tenant. It had an amorphous shape and w...

The other night I dream I am in Mexico again, but on the mainland, gently drifting, grazing the treetops. I think I am holding something ove...

The sense of space as a controlled substance is overpowering, except you don't know where it's going to take you. The Silk Road is ...

"People want conjugal love, Rachel, because it brings them well-being, a certain peace. It's a predictable love since they expect i...

"I will never do that again," she said. "Be the one who loves less." 26 Knots , by Bindu Suresh, is a love story, is sev...

I remember what's not here. An island of men who are searching for beauty and find it only in the vastness of confinement. I admit I...

I was tipsy, yes, but also I was grace itself. There is, below the surface of every conversation in which intimacies are shared, an erotic c...

On the platform of a train station, late morning, early June: two women embracing after a separation of several months. Behind them, a tall ...

Who even gets married? said Bobbi. It's sinister. Who wants state apparatuses sustaining their relationship? I don't know. What is o...

We always realize things afterwards. Loneliness, for example. It's not when we think we're alone, or when we feel abandoned. That...

In person, they baffled me even more. People without hope require direction , according to Dyson. But this wasn't what hopelessness look...

Anyone who takes gentle care of a cow is someone I trust. It's a more telling characteristic of a person than taking Communion. Certainl...

"Why is this your life? Why are you not a truck driver in Norway? Why?" I have recovered from the sickness. I continue to feel tir...

Though provincial by birth, we all considered ourselves the most cultured teenagers in our town, the ones refined enough to be embarrassed b...

"Sad sells." This might sound sadistic but it's true; people want to see their sadness reflected back at them because it makes...

One day, the past calls you up on the phone and you drop everything and go to Bosnia, because your childhood friend's brother who's ...

There's a Jewish joke that says God often rereads the Torah to try to understand what's going on in this world he created. On the 56...

If faced with a rock, for instance, one should stare deep into the place where its rockness begins to form. Then the observer should keep lo...

The pills flatten me, make me into a thin scum on the surface of still water. I don't sink. Coast instead, detached from the world aroun...