She wakes up to a clatter. She opens her eyes and sees a raccoon skate across her counter, knocking her frying pan and all the empty cans of beans across the floor. From her place on the soggy couch (which is less soggy than it was yesterday, or the day before), she looks at the […]
[translated fiction] The first thing he recognized were José Luis’s mannerisms. He remembered the way he’d sit on the bench and chew the little pink eraser on his pencil. Maybe if he tried hard enough he’d be able to remember every part of the school: the sticky hallways, the fossilized gum stuck under the long […]
I am at my classroom door. I reach for my key, unlock the door, prop it open, and turn the key again. Open, but locked. I stand at my door, look up inside the frame, and pause, for the most important step. I reach for the anti-latch device and flip it sideways. It keeps the […]
The typewriter’s film of dust: I could have written in it with a finger. It had been a while since she’d found reason to type anything. The last thing, perhaps, a fresh list of contacts she carried around with her, knowing she could not be trusted to know, might not remember. Her family, our names, […]
My mother is an assembly line of mirrors: my too borderless hair, my two-handful hips, all the parts the mannequin would not hold. If you subtract one mother, how many are left? This problem is called adoption. My mother is a locked file cabinet. No, my mother is the one who put my mother inside […]
I grew up loving Sherlock Holmes. I’d read all fifty-six stories and four novels multiple times before I was twelve years old. And he represented power to me. I mean, I was a small kid in a big neighborhood. And I wasn’t a badass. But language just seemed like a form of power. Intelligence seemed like a form of power. To know that Sherlock Holmes could control his world with just a brain seemed amazing to me. And so, he was always my alter ego. … I never considered writing any other character but a Sherlock Holmes character.
[translated poetry] Soldiers Are Sleepless Prey Do the coarse fingers of soldiers who are fighting wars touch their children’s soft hands? Did they ever know tenderness? Were soldiers who are fighting wars born soft-skinned babies with a refined laughter? Did their mothers bathe them with hot water and laurel soap and smilingly comb their hair? […]
0.1 We race distinctly American. .2 The run in itself is familiarized as 26.2 miles—a half 13.1. Here, we change to meters as the distances shrink: a 10K is more impressive than 6.2 miles in the same way that a 5K sounds further than 3.1. And yet with the marathon, there is something less glamorous […]
[creative nonfiction] I wanted to follow my brothers and sisters through. I did not mean to walk into the glass door beside the open one. My body, though slight, could not slip between its molecules; I shattered that crystal barrier. I created the shards that brought the pain and the blood drops and the shame. […]
“…frescoes translating violence into patterns so powerful and pure we continually fail to ask are they true for us.” ~Adrienne Rich, “The Images” This essay has been challenging because I’m primarily a poet and visual artist, not used to writing in the first person. It is so much easier and infinitely more satisfying to transcend […]
[translated poetry] First Afternoons in Lesbos Remember those afternoons in November. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The rain would make the patio a cloister, and the smell of the earth would reach the window from which we leaned. It was then that the house was our refuge, the island where we made our hands mature, our bodies barely debuted. […]
I Wasn’t One (Inspired by Yehuda Amichai) I wasn’t one of the stolen. I wasn’t one of the many million who had once only known the sweetness of the sea. I wasn’t confused cargo stacked like the bricks of Babel in the belly of a wooden beast. I wasn’t shackled to my skin, forgotten in […]
Here is how they disappear: Slowly, and then completely. The phone calls go from once a week to once a month, then a text message here or there; a string of emails at two in the morning full of drunk poems and questions like: How am I supposed to stop shooting dope when the asshole […]
[translated fiction] The compartment door banged open and the conductor informed us that we’d arrive in Montpellier in one hour. I repacked my things, freshened up, and went out to the corridor, waiting to see the city that would be my new home. I don’t really remember why we’d picked Montpellier for me to attend […]
[fiction] Cheryl’s bones cracked as she leaned back into her chair, the bent wood snapping and sagging under worrisome weight. John hadn’t come up the back stairs yet, leaning himself on the peeling, metal railing as he dragged his lumbering feet. She had listened for those familiar footsteps, straining her good ear in the direction […]
Whispered messages dissolve in rivers of attention and glances A long sigh exhales through the valley to Kaipara-moana Molecules of sound emanate from luminous branches A syntax of yellow leaves on black trees Filaments of falling marked by fluid silvery drops Accurate shapes, incarnate wairua exclamations Hallucinations of glamorous echoing veils Silky clay nostalgias, transgressions […]
After the hairstylist finished shearing away my hair, I remember examining the glossy brown strands scattered around me. It had once been part of me and now no longer was. How easily I had been able to renounce it. I wish I could renounce my skin and thoughts and self as easily as I had renounced my hair; but no, I am forever doomed to live in this cage of bone and flesh.
[translated poetry] Rhapsody on Stench Don’t stay at cheap hotels—just don’t, he said prostitutes that knock on doors at midnight, just like disposable containers containing disposable sex disposable toilet paper and paper cups, rusty faucets manageresses who apply too much fake perfume even the artificial lighting and white bed sheets all have stench for forty […]
I wear my purple suit to testify against my father. Deep-hued and simply tailored, it masks my insecurities, costumes me in a longed-for confidence that I hope will belie my fear. I resist smoothing the brushed-gold buttons on the jacket, avoid fingering the garment’s knotted rayon slubs. Instead I worry the flat gold pendant around […]
Ashaki Jackson began her career as a social psychologist and program evaluator before focusing on the craft of poetry. Ms. Jackson was a Cave Canem fellow and a poetry activist. She also cofounded Women Who Submit, an organization that helps women with the submission of their literary work to bring about more gender balance in […]
because you were never more than hands to boil the deer skulls, a tongue to lick the blood that dried between the creases of his knuckles. Just bones to grip and flesh to fuck on whiskey nights when his apartment stank of you. Only a bale of wheat left out in late November frost. You […]
[translated poetry] * This is how, oh so quietly, with their eyes closed, babies are dropped into the world. Like grains of rain, in the dark, from the palm of a giant hand into tubes, into a spider’s tent, a cold apple. The world is quiet, in the transparent beehive cells the babies slumber, estranged […]
[translated fiction] Class struggles had been replaced by racial animosity, which was being replaced by an unprecedented form of resentment, primitive, unclassifiable, unstructured, and all-encompassing. People hated people all day, every day. Days of wrath, days of tremendous anger, and every evening he had to convince these embittered adults to buy a contraption they had […]
[poetry] I’m on a bus reading Langston Hughes’s articles from The Chicago Defender and I realize it’s like I have no shadow. I’m on a bus sitting where I want to and in this article it’s 1946, and Hughes is in a restaurant and the hostess insists on seating him at the back of an […]
—for James Fuson (20 Years Reflections of an Empty Sky, Soft Sculpture Press, 2014) from a prison cell window seven inches of rectangular blue sometimes gray or black, but no stars the spotlights too glaring once a month the setting moon before dawn he stares pencil moves—tiny scratching of the mouse’s scurrying feet in the […]
5:02 p.m. Looking out the window you wouldn’t know Chicago is disintegrating. Cotton-candy skies swirl across the horizon. I sip cold coffee on the thirty-sixth floor of an office building. Bean-flavored liquid, the consistency of cough syrup, slides down my throat. Too much sugar. In this moment, I pretend everything is normal. People scurry from […]
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