Field Notes (Science and Environment)

I admit a degree of relief that my youngest daughter is so different from me. My bookshelves are lined with novels and two...

A dandelion’s fruiting head a jeweled amphora. Spinach tissue’s blue mosaic, too beautiful to eat. Stomata dot the skin of trillium like points on a map, what’s laid bare by...

I never liked science. Numbers are boring. I never was this nerd guy, doing the math, imagining algorithms, checking things in a laboratory... I...

I recently caught up with the teaching assistant for an undergraduate humanities course I took years ago, that helped inspire my subsequent studies.  I...

King of neither plant nor animal but of mornings after rain / / ghost sprung in the gloaming a memory of betweenness / / arisen in the dark and...

It races over the Bay of Bengal. It charges through river, paddy, and city. From Boston in my WhatsApp to family in Calcutta, I speak of Arfan. Perhaps...

April 15th, 1832 On the second day of our anchorage at the mouth of the Rio Santa Cruz, I led a party of sailors up...

I remember the diapers—ripping open bag after bag of used diapers. It was 2014 and a friend and I had volunteered to help with...

For days at the tail end of the Obama administration, I haunted my neighborhood thrift store, casing the free pile and the clothing racks...

I squeezed past Maya and closed my office door behind her, shutting out the last rays of natural light. Under the cool fluorescents, she...