I. ANNA KOURNIKOVA
Two minutes into Stanford and I’ve spotted a girl with blonde hair and a California smile. She rolls into the Wilbur quad with wheelie-bags while I sling duffels like a real man should. She gives me a first-day half-wave, the kind that says, I’ll be seeing you around, but my hands are stuffed with linens and other things so I grin back the East Coast way, my best warm-hearted grimace. And here’s the thing. I never see her around. Never once in three years. Maybe she was someone’s …

There was a fig tree
in the sick room
window, but none of this
was on our minds –
Only how the seed
is born into equilibrium
with the deadly wasp
that lives within its walls.
The fruit, a pestilence
of blood red syconia,
is cased within its sleek,
leathered mask,
hiding under finger-like leaves
that grow low to the ground.
It was this fruit only,
and its sweetness,
that announced the patch of blood
on the sheets – stain of a fit,
not a fruit – breathed deep into
the sunset of his last meal,
while all around us
the sky was burning
red on the dark, ripe
skin of the horizon.

She tells him stories; every night, after he’s tired himself out with trying to find a way home, she tells him a story.
“Once upon a time, there was a woman,” she tells him. “She was pretty as humans go – not as beautiful as me.” Her tone implies obviousness. To judge from her voice, she is almost always explaining the obvious. “Her skin was that terrible pale pinkish-brown color you have, and her hair was thin and straight, and she kept it tied up.”
She runs a …