Celebrating 20 Years of Antioch’s MFA in Creative Writing

Highway 111, as I come to know it, seems appropriately numbered–a row of three thin digits, each one almost invisible, spare and pale as the landscape it cuts through. Scattered patches of white–salt, I guess—gleam dully from the dirt like snow. Even the sky seems white, as if the blue had been taken by geese flying south, or, more likely, burned blank by the relentless sun. I feel incredibly conspicuous in my shiny green car. The only other color along this stretch of the road comes from the occasional string of boxcars stopped on the Southern Pacific railway. The trains are pretty muted, too—dusty wine, dirty mustard, black sandstormed down to gray…

my mother down the hall fast like a train
or a bus blurting away her sprint turned

to tears:—and then into drops
of shit a trail of shit and she…

At night, Hanoi is not a city. It may have changed in the last two years, but in 1995, the night was little floating lights reflected on the ground, which you felt under foot without really being able to distinguish them; no streetlights, or if so, rare and minimal. Faces gilded by the flames, hunched over something you couldn’t see…