I’ve never wanted to manage rental property, to be a landlord, to have tenants.  I tend to imagine the worst.  Rent checks arriving late or not at all, unsent by holdovers hunkered down in dilapidated units, humans possessed of necessary vigilance as they face the slowly spinning teeth of eviction…

After a storm, but not a bad one.  Then how can I call it a storm?  Strength of a contrail, speed of a jet.  Comes now raspy titmouse, jolting cardinal, jesting mouse, huffing grouse.  Peeping frog, dancing calf.  Clouds sweeping by like grass …

Then later a roadrunner huddled on top of a rock, not quite perched but resting, waiting. In the huddle, its neck had been recalled into its body which left, as I viewed it from the front, the plump, round body of a bird that in such a pose looked more like a grouse or a large dove, its long and energetic legs also somehow stored away.

Growing up in South Korea, I vividly remember my family setting up a temporary shrine in the master bedroom once a year for the Lunar New Year. Especially vivid are my memories of my grandmother screaming at everyone—all the living people, that is—to get out of that room…

Since I left Cuba, Manhattan is the only place where I feel at home. The imperial splendor of La Habana―a city where time stands still since its revolutionary takeover of 1959―resonates effortlessly in Manhattan.

I am watching pipits as they sip from the exposed terminal end of a thin black plastic tube carrying water along an irrigation network serving the plants of a backyard desert landscape…