Dilruba Ahmed

I’ve been haunted for much of this month by a bird. Not a real bird, but an animal depicted in “The Documents of Spring,” a poem by Rick Barot that appears in the latest issue of The Asian American Literary Review, which is by far the fattest literary journal to have landed on my doorstep in the past year.

It’s the cruellest month: lilacs, dead land, spring rain…you know how it goes. For several reasons this April has seemed particularly dismal to me, not in small part due to an car accident that occurred earlier, in March.

In just a couple of weeks, thousands from the literary world will descend upon hotels, bookstores, and eateries in Washington, D.C. for the annual conference of The Association of Writers & Writing Programs.

I was a longtime cell phone holdout. Even while living in Silicon Valley (or perhaps because of its fast-paced, ever-wired atmosphere), I loathed the idea of becoming “one of those people.”

There’s a song that my husband likes to sing to our son at bedtime. It’s not a traditional bedtime song, by any means, but sung slowly and softly, it’s sweeter than any lullaby I know.

I’m a sucker for shiny objects—scarves, bracelets, candy wrappers—and drawn to nearly anything bearing deep, saturated colors.