No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story.
From my back porch I have a panoramic view of east Berkeley and the San Francisco Bay, with the city skyline sparkling across the water. On clear nights the downtown lights twinkle high against the sky, doubled by their reflection in the smooth, dark bay. Below them, the lights of Berkeley are dimmer.
My father didn’t have the skills to navigate or blend one family into another, especially when the two wives had contempt for each other.
"Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog" by Dylan Thomas came to my attention yet again when Jean Seberg asks Jean-Paul Belmondo if he's read it in Goddard's iconic "Breathless".
As for writing talent, it shows in every line. You can sometimes tell from one line, like the ancient Romans could prophesize from bird flights, or the entrails of something, that there is gold in the riverbed.
If I master English, receive an English-based education, I will open a crack and have some fluidity seep through my rigid passport. Maybe one day it will open a gate of opportunities for me to move around like those who call themselves “global citizens.” And that’s what I did. That’s why I am here, typing in a language that doesn’t belong to me.
I didn’t know it at the time, when we were six and seven and would walk to the banks of the Passaic River where overturned shopping carts stood in knee-deep water, acting like seines, capturing the plastic once-white bags that eventually developed a gleam from the muck and pollution, a shimmering like the underbelly of landed bluefish, and we’d watch them undulating in the slow current as if they were alive—I didn’t know that my best friend Paula, my constant companion, the girl next door, would, at the age of seventeen, be blown up by a car bomb planted by the North Jersey mob and meant for her boyfriend.