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If I had to watch a boy’s throat instead of his face, how would I know when he was finished speaking? Even if his voice had trailed off, maybe he was only pausing to collect his thoughts. Without eye contact, a face-to-face conversation was no better than a phone call. I wondered how my friends could read advice like this and not feel hopeless. I gave up on the makeup because I couldn’t close my eyes and still see where the eye shadow should go. Short of making a life-size copy of the diagram and holding it up to my face like a stencil, the whole maneuver was physically impossible.

Winner of the 1992 Editors’ Prize for Poetry i. from Fukuoka to Kagoshima   Bottom to top, blue fills the windowpane across the aisle as though our   train rode…    read more