There are things you can’t ask at the clinic. Among your prescribed list of acceptable questions: Where is the bathroom?

Since the end of the Cambodian Civil War in 1975, and the horrific killing fields following the next four years, Cambodia has never recovered.

There’s a phrase for it, the way / I’m lately loving like a river / is pressed to my door

Like all nights, this one was muggy and black. It will rain tonight, he thought as he rubbed his arthritic knee. Maybe.

my hair sways long / black streams cascade / down my back / somewhere, skies illuminate after somber rain

Many of the “Indians” — that’s what they call themselves and what we call them too — in our small Alaskan town live in a separate community called Saxman.

It is unseemly to blow your nose into a tablecloth. If you share a / bed with another man, keep still. If you pass a person pissing, do /not greet him.

Out past the bridge, past the edge of town where the old houses give way to the stretch of firs that continues for a few miles before dissolving into shrubland, there is a little church

The topic of “real” American identity and assimilation has never been so simultaneously divisive and uniting.

It came from a catalogue. I opened / the plastic bag inside the plastic bag / and out tumbled fabric fine as flesh.

Beyond dead. Torsos glazed with epoxy, exuding an icy sheen. A spinal column exposed, its flimsy cord dangling from a robust sacrum.

Mama was born in the year of the Dog. In the Chinese Zodiac, dogs are known to be loyal and stubborn, of which she was both, but mostly I thought of her as brave.

The chalk taste of prescription pill / washed down / with too-sweet lemonade. I only take it / because you do, and I wonder / if you get high so you can tolerate me.

When a group of Alaskan women flew to Washington, D.C. to meet with Senator Lisa Murkowski during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, I wanted to be on the plane with them.

Featured artist Gabrielle Bates on the permeable boundary that exists between society and self