Listen: When you and most of the world go to sleep, I come out of my sheath and comb through the words that have been discarded, sorting and separating them into small piles on the floor around me. I contemplate the tattered shreds of Webster’s Unabridged, its once-proud onionskin papers turned to translucent confetti. No…

Listen Here: Our trip began in the percolating crowds of Plaza Once. We caught the #32 bus, which would leave us at Puente de la Noria. It used to be one of the entry ways to the great city from the Pampas but today it is the bridge over the moat holding back the poverty…

Listen here: Some time ago, I went looking for Little Red Riding Hood. Turns out, she wasn’t so easy to find. The tale begins some years back when a taxi driver, a decorated veteran of potholes, traffic jams and crooked cops, bragged to me, “Ah, I know this city like the back of my hand.…

Listen: After all the subway harangues, the sales pitches for chocolate bars, the children begging, the young men with booming voices waving prescriptions they can’t fill – all wanting money – it is a relief when at last the poets come. They are soft-spoken if they speak at all. They are well but simply dressed…

Listen: The world is a mix of empty and filled spaces that yearn towards each other. Nature, they say, abhors a vacuum and it seems to be a universal mandate that empty spaces must be filled. Yet, as we all know, the empty spaces remain. A friend whose life is full writes to say that…

Small Notebook #117 is an unassuming pocket notebook small enough to be carried everywhere – which I do. It succeeded Small Notebook #116 and a long line of Small Notebooks stretching back across time to Small Notebook #1. When it is retired, it will take its rightful place on top of a distinguished stack of…

1. It was raining outside but I was warm inside you in that room scented of teas. When we went down to the river to gaze on something other than each other, we marveled at the fish jumping. Their dull “plops” echoed in the silence under the trees and left concentric circles on the dappled…

It was a long time ago, another life really. We sat in a restaurant of starched white table cloths and talked. Long after our plates were removed and we were coaxing the last drops of champagne from the night, we talked. And talked. The other diners left. The waiters hovered at a safe distance, at…

Two people approach each other. Sparks are flying off their bodies but they force themselves to slow down, like sports cars approaching the starting line, latent power sublimated. Once they are close enough to smell each other, they extend their spines upwards and roll their shoulders back, revealing – as if they were peeling away…