"you will have found yourself on the far side of Newfoundland, of which you know little except that it is the place where the Titanic had sunk."

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"Names once taken will not be given back with whips but with words."

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"Somewhere between Ethiopia and Sudan, they drift amid the muddy reeds, mangroves, and hyacinth fields, like vagrant palm fronds."

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"It happens every other night: / At dusk, it swims up menacingly from the abysmal depths, it exposes its toxic flowers to the cool night breeze, and then devilishly offers its petals to be pasted, smoked, or eaten for the sedated pleasure of men."

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"M. left on a British Airways chartered flight to Manchester with a passport which belonged to someone dark enough for the immigration officers to overlook it."

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"My writing constrains itself. It limits itself to what I know and cages itself within my experience."

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"A single Turkana boy stands clinging to the wire fence dressed in green checkered shuka, eying the disembarking jetlagged humanitarians, unknowing that he too will soon become an exhibit in the Nairobi National Museum..."

​

"You fell in a forest and you did not exist before I knew you / You will therefore cease to exist once I forget you, unless you return to haunt our first encounter under the flowerless jacaranda, stunted from blooming..."

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"Stone turns to walls, turn to rubble. Repurposed as brick."

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"She shall come as a goddess, with broad wings and white feathers."

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My anchor you were

In a hollow, lonely town

And I, only your yoke

​