I’m not prone to premonitions, but my gut has long told me Arizona would bring the showdown. I haven’t avoided the desert southwest because of it. After all, I risked seeing the creatures every time I left my Pacific Northwest home for either Mexico, Laos, Thailand, India or Kenya….
Fringe Magazine, March 2009
Read Online
A Nature Lover’s Phobia
Three Signs of Maturity
Four months after we left Nepal, I took dictation on his kindergarten tale about the spirit of the whole world who died falling from a treetop, came back to life, and split into two: Buddha and Jesus. He began it in his father’s native tongue – Nepali – and ended it in mine – English….
Opium Magazine, September 2009
In the Flat Field
I watch their tongues
like snails without shells
curling around smooth brome
They tear and grind
tear and grind and circle
a mound of composting sod ten feet high….
High Desert Journal, January 2010
Looking for Black Gibbons
I try to curb my hope for seeing the endangered black gibbons of Bokeo Forest Reserve. But I do expect to eye a few birds or a snake….
Wanderlust and Lipstick, Winter 2010
Flora, Oregon
Spring through fall, I live in a yurt on a former ranch in northeastern Oregon. If you were to visit, I’d take you for a walk. Wear long pants and boots for rattlesnakes….
Orion Magazine, Nov/Dec. 2010
Order in print
Read online version titled “Canyon Dreams” (may have a few typos)
Costume
“She needs something for special occasions,” my husband tells the shopkeeper in Hindi. I’m not sure yet what those will be….
In Posse Review, Winter 2011
The Shining World
I worried most about formal night. The brochure suggested a cocktail dress or pantsuit. Pantsuit? I opened my closet. Second-hand dresses, hippie skirts: I tried them all on and tossed them all onto my bed. I considered round two of fashion limbo at Clackamas Town Center with bigger mirrors and brighter lights then examined the brochure again. The women on the cover wore sleeveless tops in apricot, lime, and watermelon pastels. Some leaned on a railing. Behind them, the sun set over a calm ocean. I wouldn’t be going where they were….
Connotation Press, July 2011
Order In Print
Natural Births
We relax on the verandah and lift the first pieces of roast chicken to our mouths. Before we can bit into the charred meat, two men rush out of the darkness into the courtyard and approach us….
The Gettysburg Review, Spring 2009
Fieldnotes on Flooding in Nepal
At the base of the HImalayan foothills in Nepal spreads the fertile Chitwan Valley. Bordered on the West by the Narayani and on the east by the Rapti, it was once covered by marshes and dense forests of sal, teak, and Indian rosewood. Asian rhinoceros and Bengal tigers flourished….
The Truth About the Fact, Spring 2009
Witnessing Indra’s Sin
June 2008 — Nepal’s ten-year civil war has ended and claimed at least 13,000 lives. The once insurgent Maoists have prevailed in elections. They deliver on their promise to replace the 300 year-old Hindu monarchy with a republic. The twenty-nine million who inhabit this mountainous country pinched between China and India nurture a fragile democracy and weigh their gains and their losses….
Fishtrap Anthology, 2008
Ama
Ama looks at me from the 24-inch television screen that sits on a bookshelf along one wall of my small living room. She stands in front of the flower garden I began planting nine years earlier and implores me in Nepali: “Please come back. Come visit us. We still love you. We want to see you….”
The Crab Orchard Review, Spring 2009
Now That I’ve Moved Inland
I inhale vanilla perfume of ponderosa pine
and sip espresso miles from the shores
where i once dodged waves,
chased gulls, overturned rocks.
Then came the breakfast sounds — brassy bells
beating the muscled necks of fifty mooing cows….
High Desert Journal, Spring 2010
What the Photo Shows
I savor what the photo shows from that day
when winter mist cradled us between the marshy
toes of Annapurna and Ganesh Himal,
how it helps us remember
where red bougainvillea, red powdered rice, and tangerines spilled
over green leaf plates held together by twigs….
The Mom Egg, Spring 2010
Flora, Oregon
Spring through fall, I live in a yurt on a former ranch in northeastern Oregon. If you were to visit, I’d take you for a walk. Wear long pants and boots for rattlesnakes….
Orion Magazine, Nov/Dec. 2010
Order in print
Read online version titled “Canyon Dreams” (may have a few typos)
Sundered
After Mother called Nepal to tell me
your cardiac muscle had stopped
contracting, I joined mourners at Devghat.
They carried corpses and firewood….
Carpe Articulum Literary Review, Winter 2010
Meeting My Future in the Dark
After nearly twenty-four hours of overland travel from New Delhi, we entered my fiancé’s homeland at Bhairawa — a nondescript border town along a muddy road. A doctoral student in anthropology, hoping to study poverty and social inequality in India, I tried to temper my desire for images I’d seen on postcards: hillsides dotted with red rhododendrons, rice paddies carved from steep slopes, snowy peaks so high they appeared more rooted in clouds than earth….
The Raven Chronicles, Winter 2011
Publications
Academic Essays
Imagined Sisters: The Ambiguities of Women’s Poetics and Collective Action in Chitwan.” In Selves in Time and Place: Identities, Experience and History in Nepal. Edited by Al Pach and Debra Skinner (1998).
“Beyond Writing: Feminist Practice and the Limits of Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 9 (4): 537-568 (1994).
Collective Powers in Common Places: The Politics of Gender and Space in a Women’s Struggle for a Meeting Center in Chitwan, Nepal.” Himalayan Research Bulletin (1992).
