In pictures, your limbs are always a blur, as if the camera couldn’t possibly catch you in a still moment. Always wide-mouthed: mid-laugh or mid-song or mid-happiness. Your eyes are always fixated on the camera, or its operator. Dad had an eye for photography. Or maybe he just had an eye for you. …

    we saw the dark moon rise, and hid behind the deep trench, me and the people I call my own. we know there is dirt, but there is also grit; a brother stirring a bowl of soaked garri so it isn’t overrun by dryness, & passing around after lifting a spoon of unsugared …

    There are maps of knowing and unknowing. Seven thousand species of bird locked in a glass cabinet, brightly colored males & unpretentious females. Almost every living thing on Earth has already perished. My daughter carries a dogeared copy of Maus in her backpack. I have questions. She has questions.

    One smacks my arm to tell me my hat has fallen on the snowy ground. I pick it up, she doesn’t look back, just keeps walking. Another shoves sticky rice cake into my mouth for the new year, our bodies damp with the sweat of the sauna’s air. One more shows me how …

    Everybody’s got stuff going on by which she means they shouldn’t bring their flavour of shit to work and bother her, and she’s right, of course, like that meeting where we were talking about profit margins and our colleague got a phone call which sent him white, something which I thought only happened …

    The doctor lets me play with beeps and lights. He says, say the word, airplane. Say the word hotdog. Someone plunges cold gloop into my ears. The half-deaf know this ritual of sitting for custom molds, hoping the earpiece feels more like a slipper than a dress shoe. Putting on my first pair …