[flash fiction] I’m standing outside under a streetlamp, waiting. I’m not supposed to go in there. First, I am an alcoholic and I can’t go near a bar. I turn into a liar within two drinks, spreading gossip and promises, and hinting at extraordinary, eccentric hidden wealth. Two more and I am a beast, busting […]
“Is it dead?” I turn towards the tiny voice beside me. Moments ago she was spinning in circles with arms stretched wide. Her little pink skirt flying above the asphalt. She’s alone. I’m not sure who she belongs to. “It’s not dead, sweetheart,” I say. “It’s just not moving.” I grip the fence in front […]
Grief is a mouse in the house. Unless it’s taken outside now and then, it will nibble a person away and leave an empty husk behind. No one survives death, of course, but some do not survive grief. I discovered this when my wife Evelyn unexpectedly died of a heart attack in her forties. I […]
DJ races under the schoolyard hoop to snatch my ball and fling it over the rusted chain link into the street. The ball skids in the gutter in front of the bus riders who hoot and point and I get embarrassed and mad all at the same time. “Boy you’re nothin’ playin’ in this school […]
Folks are never going to just change their mind about something because you tell them they should. They are going to change their mind because they feel a stake in it. Art is a tremendous way to create that kind of stake because it enables you to enter the experience of another person and see […]
Lois Dodd was born in Montclair, New Jersey. She attended Cooper Union in New York City, where she started painting. She was part of the New York Tenth Street art scene in the 1950s and was one of the founders of the Tanager Gallery in 1952. Her works are found in many museums, including the […]
Eloise Klein Healy is a poet and the Founding Chair and Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing Emerita at the Antioch University Los Angeles (AULA) MFA program. Eloise has written eight books, and been a literary beacon as editor, educator, mentor, LGBTQ advocate, and feminist pioneer. In 2012, Eloise was appointed first Poet Laureate of Los […]
I. Winter sits heavy in our guts and we can no longer chew —in confident, elegant pride— herbs, bark, and rocks on the rough roads of the diaspora. Poetry left wrinkles around our eyes and tongue a miniature egg wrapped in a cloth and the smoke of a train leaving for the gray snow of […]
The Horseshoe Finder (A Pindaric fragment) We look at a forest and say: +++— Here is timber for ships and masts, Rosy pines, Free of hairy burden to their very tops, They should screech in the storm As lonely pines In a raging forestless air; The plumb-line fastened firmly to the dancing deck will […]
[flash fiction] He is nineteen, American, and devout. Today, he wears a backward baseball cap in place of a yarmulke for the first time. This might lead to long, uncomfortable conversations when old, Protestant men chastise him at dinner tables. He decides this isn’t a legitimate concern. He mostly eats with Jews, and such men […]
Hanging Laundry The eighties: a little boy hangs laundry on a fourth floor balcony in Jerusalem. He clips the clothes on tight, diligent in checking that nothing dangles to the ground— vests, white shirts for Shabbat, socks, the little boy sees underwear and is embarrassed. Today, his mother is no longer here, the underwear is […]
At first, we kept it underneath the porch. Jack wanted me to hide it in my room, but my mom would have found it and scrapped it. She had already stripped the wiring in the garage, and pretty soon, any metal in the house was going to the scrap yard and then straight into her […]
Through the thin wall between the two classrooms, Miss Whitfield can hear everything Ms. Lucca says. “If you get married before you really know yourself, there’s a good chance you’ll end up divorced. Look at me! I married a man!” Ms. Lucca calls her advice “Real Talk” and the kids love it. So does Miss […]
This is what I knew: My nephew Benji graduated from drama school. When he crossed the stage to accept his diploma, he wore a sultry Lauren Bacall wig and a cream-colored satin evening gown with padded shoulders. His make-up was perfect, his lips the color of blood and desire. My mother told me he looked […]
Novelist Vu Tran was born outside of Saigon five months after the city fell to the North Vietnamese, immigrated to the United States when he was five, and grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Likewise, Tran’s debut novel, Dragonfish (W.W. Norton, 2015), begins in Vietnam and intersects American and Vietnamese cultures. The novel opens in italics […]
The Jaguar I am leaving the earth with a jaguar in my hand a jaguar that carries a heart in its hand in the silent looms of Mitla the Mexican night grows like sharing bread with a brother I let the jaguar eat my heart jaguar with heart in its hand About Writing this […]
We were waiting for rain the day my sister stopped talking. We examined the swollen clouds and waited. Mom and Dad prattled on about the football game that was holding up traffic to I-10, the church talent show, the neighbor’s runaway Chihuahua, the sandwich shop opening up on Fifth, and the sad state of our garden. I […]
[flash fiction] We see a glitch in the sky that looks like a pixelated cloud. It bursts into rain, soothing the drought-ridden rainforest, then it implodes. More glitches appear, raining all over the unusually dry continent. Summer vacationers welcome refreshing relief from sun. Farmers rejoice. A hacker releases a video taking credit for the rainclouds. […]
In the ’90s you could be whatever you wanted—someone said that on the news—and by 1998 Fatima felt ready to become black, full black, baa baa black sheep black, black like the elbows and knees on praying folk black, if only someone would teach her. Up to that point, she had existed like a sort […]
I want to reach out and slide the button back in the buttonhole. She’s standing right in front of me, wearing a light green dress with buttons on the back. A row of buttons, like a dotted line drawn from her nape to a random point halfway down her spine. I count the buttons: one, […]
Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir (Bloomsbury USA, 2007), and The Still Point of the Turning World (The Penguin Press, 2013), which was a New York Times Bestseller and Editor’s Pick, and a finalist for the PEN USA Prize in Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in numerous noteworthy publications such […]
It’s morning, the hawks are hunting. It’s morning, the hawks are hunting. Frightening are those other forms of life which see no value in humanity: the dark forest, the beasts of prey, the mafia, the extremist movements for decent citizens, the enemies for all, the neighbours, The Great Satan. On the way home from the […]
Last month I was the guest author at a writing workshop. I’d been invited to talk about memoir and the complicated and often discouraging journey of getting published. I had just finished reading an excerpt from my book, an addiction memoir about my former life as a junkie bank robber, and I was fielding questions […]
After I pass through security, I’ll have left them. Beergut, Special Son, and I hang out in a loose triangle several feet away from the glass doors. Nothing left to say or do, the time of my flight to Seoul heavy and ticking. I avoid Beergut’s icy gaze, look to metal crossbeams. The airport houses […]
It was the first time she let a man touch her face like that. She wanted a soft warm glow of a room, but instead got clinical. A light bulb shot to her eyeballs. The man’s white fingers were bone delicate. His hands, they swept up the dark strands of her hair, and he looked […]
The much talked about Between The World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates is about murder—the murder of black people by white people in a country that has thrived, since its inception, on the abuse of black bodies. This thriving is economic, but it is also cultural and, therefore, part of our identity as Americans. Over […]
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