When I say the tree was hollow, I do not mean the trunk of it. No, the trunk was sturdy and new. Instead, the branches grew in all directions, even along the ground, spreading feverishly, so that there was a space inside where you could sit and talk, feet dangling off the ground, like being […]
[fiction] The first boy she ever kissed was actually two. Behind the heavy velvet curtains on the stage at the community center. It was summer; they were counselors who ignored their campers, who smoked the dried-up weed she had found in her brother’s dresser, smoked it behind the dumpster during lunch, crouching to avoid the […]
Night, and your absent memory crept into my heart As in a wasteland, spring blossoms quietly As in a desert, the zephyr sways gently As to a dying man, relief comes, unexpectedly. Rubai Raat yuuñ dil meñ tirī khoī huī yaad aa.ī Jaise vīrāne meñ chupke se bahār aa jaa.e Jaise sahrāoñ meñ […]
Green signs loom over I-80, beckoning us towards Omaha; it’s difficult not to exit downtown to the Courtyard Marriott, tell them we want our old room so we could pretend we’re still new at this. I could still get butterflies when he emerges from the bathroom in a shirt and tie, flash-forwarding to the man […]
There must be a Yiddish word for the birds chittering in the bare bushes ablaze with the life of their voices; though their bodies blend with branches their voices belie nothing. My mother’s of course I will I want sew themselves through the fabric of […]
In the shower, I let the hot water rinse out the blood, the tremors in my fingers quieting. I have a nice stack of scars and I wonder if they’ll still be there when I’m old, if I make it to old, and what I’ll tell my children or grandchildren when they ask me what they are. Maybe I’ll tell them that I was a knife juggler. They’ll like that. …
If memory is talisman, this I hold in my palm: my father strides, back straight and face serious, to the edge of the pool. It’s a late summer day. Children of other families splash and shout, a cooling breeze chases the sun. My father is sturdy, not fat and not thin, handsome with wavy dark […]
[fiction] I’m just appreciating what’s pleasing about Trent when it all goes wrong. He phones me, his voice less sweet and friendly than it was an hour ago. There’s a crackle of anxiety present now. “Den…” he says. After he’s spoken my name there is a sharp little silence. I break it with a sigh. […]
A sin of beauty is a toy forever: I transgress; I jumble up words, fumble for the right age, mislabel Keats for Yeats, bumble between the present tense and the past tense. For elegance, for beauty, for my inflexible desire, I dismiss faithfulness and disable meaning. I mistranslate flyable twilight as an unshakable rock in […]
In our last conversation, he sat
on a milk crate, held the unlit
cigarette like a fountain pen,
and kept tapping the filter against
his weak heart. …
[poetry] I remember the smell of rusty handlebars, of rotten onions, smoke, garlic meatballs, stale fried fish, and clogged toilets. The local train smelled of skin of man and animal, of cheap tobacco and unwashed clothes, the smell of poverty and cold. The peasants carried raffia sacks stuffed with bread, food for chickens, and pigs. […]
Sister My sister is sitting on the bank of a ploughed field, catching the last grains like fish. The black earth is agitated, spattering poisonous salt throwing foam beneath the blackthorn bush. I go up to her, bent and old, sobbing, so she pities me, saying, “Look, I’m cold, I’ll die.” And she answers me, […]
[fiction] Kolarov started watching Longmire on Netflix last winter while engaging in half-hearted workouts on the bike trainer. The show has begun to own him. Kolarov is an IT guy, the dude you see in the office wearing a blue polo shirt and khaki pants, pushing a cart loaded with computers. That was before Longmire. […]
My brother Mark is the essence of juvey cool, hair slicked back in a perfect duck’s ass, white T-shirt with a pack of Camels rolled up in one sleeve, Levis like the skin he was born in, pointy-toed shoes that the Mexican kids call cockroach killers. He is sixteen, months from dropping out of high […]
Today: “Ms. Rolfe, are you dying?” This isn’t the first time a student has asked me this after I had a coughing fit in class. In fact, I get asked this all the time. Too often. And I’m used to it. But today, I am hanging on by a thread. I have trouble walking up […]
[fiction] A lady of leisure, Leela spent most of her time reading novels and literary magazines. She sat on the terrace, gazing at the white sailboats in the sapphire waters of Bay of Bengal, drying her long, lustrous hair in the bright sunshine, bantering with her sisters-in-law. Leela never went downstairs for breakfast until after […]
1 The ogre is bad-tempered He throws a fit Hurling rotten stones Giant stale rocks, to be more precise The ogre wants fresh stones And the dream doesn’t leave him alone: I want stones Timely stones My exhaustion wants them Living stones Stones that break away from your seconds fall over me Stones that pour […]
in the 1960s The name itself is a kingdom brambled over in exotics, where fish & birds read like orchids, and an oil-flat sea’s gone dull beside a land possessed of its own drumbeat—fist to heart, a howled & primal green. After all, Amazon sounds more tribal than rivered. Venezuela, its new language an assignation […]
My best friend is buying a house in Upstate New York with her boyfriend. A family friend expects her first child in eight days. I’m twenty-two, and I have never felt more alone. I. “For this was the round of love: fear which leads on desire, tenderness and fury, and that brutal anguish which triumphantly […]
I’m staring at the footage from a short film I shot two years ago. I put so much time and energy into the production—writing the screenplay, casting actors, rehearsing, raising money, planning the artistic design, figuring out technical aspects of the cinematography—only to see it shelved after production wrapped. Making films requires a lot of […]
Tree branches sneak into my mouth errant like Christmas lights strung across a house in July, skies embrace and push — suffocate the world’s radiant lusciousness. Leaves on the sidewalk thrum and this is where I want to share a bit of death every day, peeling strips of joy from branches that are about to […]
[creative nonfiction] List in hand: canned kitty food, hair color stuff, ribbon, Blue Plate’s Greek Lite Mayonnaise with Yogurt. Two names in the corner: Shaun / Elijah. The two names off to the right are the two you buy presents for each year. Only these two. It’s hot. Grab a cart. Pause to type a […]
[fiction] He was dead-drop Zen with eyes of Sufi swirling; smoking, a catch for any NLP-savvy, Nietzsche-Kant gal, but if you looked a little closer you could see the dark, Goethic shadow hidden behind that tan, well-defined Qabalah. He was ad hoc but never half-cocked and everything he coined wore shades. She was a tall […]
On the day of my great-aunt Era Mae and great-uncle Alvin’s fiftieth wedding anniversary, I wore my stepfather’s striped, navy tie and—after stopping for breakfast on the drive through North Alabama—a small grease stain on my khaki pants. Over the air conditioner, my grandmother told me I should’ve put a napkin on my lap first. […]
I walked over to the mirror and saw my pale arms sticking out of the light-colored dress. My legs were covered in bruises, scabs, and Band-Aids from my adventures in fence scaling, soccer playing, and wrestling with Jacob from next-door. I also had a tendency to mess with the wandering cats outside, and multiple scratches let me know they did not enjoy having their butts poked with sticks. …
Yoo-hoo! I’m back here, in the bedroom, in the bed. I’m seventeen, I’m twenty-two, I’m thirty-seven, fifty. I dress in white and lie here. Let’s just say it’s mono, or Some Disease, the lazies, or the dreads. Let’s just say I never learned to spell élan vitale right. Let’s just say I should be dead. […]
[creative nonfiction] When a new recycling shop specializing in crafts items opens near me and requests donations, I decide it’s time: I gather up my years’ worth of hoarded Altoids tins, Mason jars, fancy gift boxes, barely crinkled tissue paper, and a jar full of the orange and magenta ribbons from the handles of boutique […]
They crashed into a pit, half mud, half sand, like a meteor falling from the sky, or rather, like remnants of a tumbling meteor—their plane disintegrated mid-nosedive as though it was wrapped in papier-mâché, as though it was wrapped in the old newspapers back home that shared the same haunting headline at every street corner, […]
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