How do we make sense of the seemingly clear divisions between the institutional and the popular, the collective and the person, the physical and the spiritual, the secular and the sacred?
"we pretended that the ginkgo nuts were bombs/ filled with lethal gases,// that the branches were stairs/ leading to our home with green walls/ and windows you could see out of but not into,
"My friend Jackie drove me the 50 miles or so from the larger city where she lived down to the state capital, the location of the state’s main medium-security prison. I’d talked on the phone the day before with my friend, going over the final details of my visit and the endless rules to follow."