Hannah Tishkoff, Beginning of a Poem, 2026, colored pencil on found wood, 9 x 9.5 x 1 in, from issue no. 256. Courtesy of Hannah Tishkoff and OCHI, photograph by Deen Babakhyi.

In the airport the bald man with the salt-and-pepper mustache is saying to three women, Unless you’re a comedian—listen to me—unless you’re a comedian, it’s not smart to have a favorite expression.

In the mirror I see a bug crawl down my face, eliciting curses. But it’s just a dark wound in the mirror, an immobile injury to the silver. My eyes have gotten so bad that everything’s a bug.

In the raised drain-stopper I see my miniaturized face, with a long glass horn emerging from my forehead—the tap’s steady gush.

In Edward P. Vining’s An Inglorious Columbus (1885), a massive, labyrinthine book presenting “Evidence That Hwui Shän and a Party of Buddhist Monks from Afghanistan Discovered America in the Fifth Century, A.D.,” we find “that large armies of mice occasionally migrate from Asia to America, or in the other direction.” Probably not unrelatedly: a UPI article of April 1996 reports that an Ohio man was indicted for ordering vials of bubonic plague bacteria, which he claimed he needed to defeat a horde of disease-bearing rats deployed by Iraq against the United States.

In the Shan Hai King we find the locus classicus for the story of a pre-Columbian Asian discovery of America. This court history contains the account of a Buddhist monk who discovered a land to the east. “Neumann gives [his] name as Hoei-schin; Dr. Bretschneider, as Hui-shên. When not translating Dr. Neumann, I have written it Hoaei-shin.” So writes Charles G. Leland in his book Fusang. His epigone, Edward P. Vining, writes it Hwui Shän.

In double summertime, under monstrous sun, I pay my divers devoirs. The cinema beckons. I grow glib. I say, We can either see a very loud action movie or an elliptical French movie.

In my dream the rent bill arrives. When I awake I find that it truly has.

In the morning sleep pollutes my mouth, my voice.

In Paris I disparage your spelling, your taste in men.

In case words fail me, I learn more words.

In the last city everything happens at breakneck speed. You can trust nothing, not even your money.

In Antarctica she writes to my sister, presumably out of nothing to do.

In her protracted and strangely unannoying British phase she added u’s to words like odour, humour, harbour, vigour.

In the pen barrel was a picture of a ferryboat, which sailed to the other end if you tilted the pen, turning the Mississippi into Niagara Falls.

In her hair are pieces of light.

In Australia they think she’s a prostitute.

In Chicago R.’s beyond us now, always and still the prodigy, with a wife of little English and an extra room, busy subtracting infinity from infinity.

In Rome they have a gum called Brooklyn. In Korea they have a gum called Haitai, which is misread by some as Haiti. In my youth there was a gum called Major League Chew. I believe he marched with Chiang Kai-shek. [Laughter]

In Buffalo when we were young my father used to order the occasional beer with dinner at a restaurant, not because he especially wanted one, but to show all who might care that Asians weren’t, by nature, cheap. In New York I try to touch the cashier’s hands a little, overcompensating, having read bizarre complaints by Black customers that Korean shop owners never touch their hands, the even more bizarre justification being that it’s a cultural thing, Koreans aren’t hand touchers, goes the canard, it’s Confucian or something, and so I just want to touch their hands, the non-Korean cashiers’, a little so that they know I’m not like that. They don’t like this, the cashiers of many hues.

In New York I drink heavily sugared beverages imported from Korea. Yogurt drinks in plastic barellettes shorter than my finger. Canned coffee drinks you have to shake well. A rice punch with the sinister name “Vilac Shikhye.” This regimen lasts about a week and I forget what the point is.

In the dream of purchase there’s a Jonathan Richman bootleg I covet, containing the songs “Won’t Go Down to Cambridge St.” and “Banana Milk—Oops!” These songs of course do not exist. The end of the dream is me at the cash register, gradually realizing that it’s all a dream, and my currency will prove as worthless as photographs of other people’s pets.

In a jazz review I read the word “cantillate” and don’t know what it means. Later I know what it means and take pains to cantillate the lines of whatever book I’m writing, advertisements, journal entries.

In the meeting he rubs his arm like a nurse or a junkie trying to draw a vein. His hair’s duck-assed and his sideburns are at once postmodern, ironic, and sincere.

In the theater a guy in the row behind me says knowingly to his friend, “One of the best scenes in the movie.” His friend assents earnestly. Then they’re quiet again.

In Seoul she works for an MSG company. She proofreads pamphlets in English that claim MSG occurs naturally and is not only not bad for you but is in fact rather salutary.

In Seoul men spit at will and with impunity, walking outside along the street. What country was it where little kids urinated in the road, or on the grass, or by the pool, seemingly all day long?

In the Indian restaurant the old man, white, doesn’t let the middle-aged woman, Chinese, get a word in edgewise. It’s not clear what the relationship is here—he teaches her English at “the Center,” and may be interested in her romantically, or was once. Those Chinese, he says, they work their tails off, do you know what “work their tails off” means? It’s an idiom. You could say “work their asses off” but that’s vulgar. The tail is near where the ass is. Later she says of a fellow student, She must lose her marble!

In Ghana, she tells me, people say “somehow” a lot. It modifies and qualifies more than we know, somehow.

In Paris, in Tokyo, in Singapore, in Prague, I stumble out, insane with coffee.

In the course of a day’s writing my script gets looser, larger, more drunk on itself than is proper or decent. I aspire, sometimes, to the intoxicated, relentlessly ecstatic calligraphy found in Huai-su’s Autobiographical Essay, from the eighth century. The story is that he grew increasingly tight as he wrote it, or maybe that was someone else.

In a few years even advertisements and football scores, even voodoo sex-murder stories, seem quaint, fragile, verging on sad.

An excerpt from Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties, out in August from Random House.