To plan a route to pick up my child from school, I check iceout.org for a map of recent ICE sightings. They’ve multiplied in recent days, with the Federal occupation surging to 3,000 agents in Minneapolis, five times the size of the city’s police department. Earlier in the morning, . . .

I’m writing this because of a translator’s note that’s got me worked up, a paratext that appears in the Korean edition of Torrey Peters’s novel Detransition, Baby.

Begging to differ, we have not

An ounce of poetry, no libraries, no bindings,

No sooth-singers, no melting iambs.

I left without saying goodbye to him, my escape quicker and quieter than I’d imagined. And now, as I walk down my street, everything has taken on a peculiar quality: the road narrower than I thought, the stench of trash rising and mingling with a trace of ginger, the lights at the corner . . .

In late summer 2005, I disembarked in the city of Mostar after a three- or four-hour bus ride from Dubrovnik, the vaunted pearl of the Adriatic in neighboring Croatia. The wars that had dismantled Yugoslavia . . .

Sometimes we wake with a cave in our chest,
a dwelling we call Look here with me and weep.