When I was nine years old my first love died. She liked to sit out in the sun, in front of Niña Marina’s whorehouse, her face to the sky, her long hair behind her, the tips touching the sandy soil of Acajutla, that little town where I grew up. People called her La Garroba: The […]
Ambivalence is when you tell your friends that some guy made ching-chong noises at you in the hallway after school and their responses range from, “Ew,” to a sarcastic, “Oh, how nice,” to nothing at all. When that happens, you feel ashamed. You wish you knew why. Maybe it’s because you have it better than […]
Andromeda Romano-Lax began her career as a travel writer and freelance journalist before focusing on fiction. She has published in multiple newspapers and magazines from Seventeen to Steinbeck Studies. She cofounded the nonprofit, 49 Alaska Writing Center (Anchorage, Alaska) and teaches at the low-residency MFA program at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She freelances as […]
[fiction] Her husband had said of the last bonbon, “These are not bad.” So, Victoria saved the green wrapper with the drawing of pears and a few weeks later, back at the Russian grocery, showed it to the cashier. “These were a part of last month’s assortment.” The cashier disappeared in the back. Victoria picked […]
Enitan woke up to the sound of Ogechi’s voice, she was shouting something. Her voice was hoarse—the first thing that had made him fall in love with her. He waited a while until she calmed down. “What was that?” he asked. She didn’t look at him. “It’s my mum,” she said. “What’s going on with […]
Downtown street trees glowed with Christmas lights as music from the holiday carousel wafted over from Seattle’s Westlake Park. “How cute is that!” chirped my sister-in-law as we stepped around a line of families waiting to take Santa pictures. Prattling over our 2016 gift lists, we came to a stop behind a pack of shoppers […]
Near the end of her abortion memoir Annie Ernaux writes, “…these things happened to me so that I might recount them. Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, …causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people” (92). Not […]
The Fetus of the Dream Dream fetuses. And in the fetus dream, like a growing amplified silence— like ivy around nothing: I dreamed last night. I dreamed of wet ivy— wet like water and rapidly growing— water that smells like old wine in the deepest treasure beneath the earth, where the spider danced the figure […]
Last year I attended a party with my mother, in honor of her friend Carolyn’s 75th birthday. The party was filled with people from my mother’s past. Most of them had met at Mesa Community College in the 1970s. They’d been part of a pilot program designed for women returning to school after taking hiatuses […]
These images, taken in 2016 in the Pacific Northwest, demonstrate my interest in using tonalities and arrangements to elicit abstract shapes from natural objects. My art photographs utilize isolation of detail as a tactic to focus attention; I enjoy discovering how realistic contents can be grasped in new ways when guided by the discerning camera lens […]
I am a myth-maker; I make myths of men. My journals and essays and mental spaces are filled with names like Jared, Jeter, and Jefferson, all of them monsters I tried to tame with a pen. My version of myth-making is a form of self-deception. I don’t do this on purpose. It’s a defective coping […]
On the face of it, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is a collection of ten short stories, many of which take place on the same island, many of which contain strong elements of magical realism, and all of which employ precise, evocative language. In “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” against the backdrop of […]
I opened the door to my parents’ downstairs closet and flicked on the fluorescent lights. The room smelled like old coats and disuse. There I was again, home for the holidays and indulging in some bi-annual sentimental scavenging. My broken beginner’s Fender Stratocaster was leaning against the wall; on the high shelf sat a retired […]
[fiction] I’m wearing my banana-yellow pantsuit and my best ash-blonde, bob-styled wig. He’s an hour late. One of my fake lashes falls on my lap. The glue still sticky on my eyelid. He yells from outside my window. You up there? I press the eyelashes back in place and stumble out of the apartment and […]
A line was already forming outside the glass doors of Queens County Family Court, on a grey February morning. It was 7:45. Inside, police officers milled about sipping coffee while municipal employees with key card access politely skirted the crowd, buzzing themselves in through a side door. At 8:00 one of the officers unlocked a […]
Martín Espada, where have you been all of my life? I believe that the universe sends artists, writers and poets gifts of inspiration when they truly need it. Espada is a Latino poet, like me, born in America, who has the eloquence of Walt Whitman and the passionate pulsating spirit of Charles Bukowski. Espada’s poetry […]
On April 26, 2017, Hulu will release a TV series based on Margaret Atwood’s classic dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. Originally published in 1986, the story finds us in a North America occupied by the Republic of Gilead, a fundamentalist Christian government where women are a rigidly controlled sexual and reproductive commodity. It’s commonly […]
late night fireplace hiss; you bury yourself in rumpled quilts; woolen sanctums for solitude. circling your callused chest is a prison and epiphany— mouths and pectorals make a reckless truce to learn the metaphors of symmetry. we slipped one quarter in love and the rest in snow; our crumbling house is beige-mess of carpet string, […]
There was a time in my life when I entertained the idea of saying the following out loud—“I do not identify as white.” I considered saying this because in my cultural studies classes, at my liberal arts college, I had learned that race was a construct and that the concept of race was created by white people […]
This collection of poetry opens with epigraphs by Charles Darwin, including one that lists similarities in the “framework of bones” between different animals: fins and hands, vertebrae in giraffes and elephants, “and innumerable other such facts, at once explain themselves on the theory of descent” (11). The poems shift their subjects from animals to humans, […]
Something has been missing. I’ve been looking for it since the election. Amid the noise of national politics I’ve felt an underlying void. There’s something that is bigger than my fear of the current administration or its impact. It’s bigger than Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer, and Michael Flynn. In my life, it’s bigger than whatever […]
Each piece is made from ordinary items such as balls, light fixtures, outdoor flowers and even a jelly fish. The ordinary does not have to stay as such and this collection is meant to challenge the concept of ordinary and take you to the universe of infinite space, where the impossible is possible.
I think I’ve been to Disneyland twenty times since November 2016. I live in Orange County, about fifteen minutes from the park, and most days I wait till school is out so I can take my daughters with me. But I also go alone. I’m thirty-six. As kids growing up in San Diego, my sisters […]
The 2016 edition of The Best American Short Stories, edited by Junot Diaz, plumbs the multiplicity of writing within the English language – and it may be a beacon for the future of the North American canon. The stories contained within this collection represent the vast experience of writing within an “American” life, as opposed […]
As a video game producer, my job is to address problems that arise in development. Whether it is to make a boring level fun, or to create a plan to moderate the penises that players inevitably create (using in-game text, player animations, or level editing tools), I work with my team to find solutions. And I’m […]
Ascension When at last it tilted worse to land than leave what happened was this: the birds snipped their gravitational strands. They took two or three or five final wing strokes heavenward and on that momentum traveled, up and out. Kingdom, Phylum, Class: Aves the birds folded splendor, resisted iridescence, overrode any hints of song. […]
The day begins with me realizing I am sore. My legs, butt, lower back, even my torso feel like I’ve been in a professional football game. Which is something I know a little bit about; once upon a time, though not for long, I ran with footballs for money. Presently, my soreness is the result […]
Live Girls by Beth Nugent is the story of Catherine, twenty-years-old, who abandons her first year of college at a women’s religious university, moves to the nearby city where she takes up residence at a seedy transient hotel, and accepts a job as a ticket seller in a squalid, decaying porn theatre. Catherine is pretty, curiously […]
I lost my mind again. I lose it frequently, to varying degrees, but it generally returns quickly. Lately, though, my mind has taken longer trips, leaving me alone with my body for weeks at a time. In its place, there is rage. I have stared blankly at the ceiling, contemplating suicide. I have […]
When business was slow, the curandero would take his skills to the stable to heal horses. To the ladies at the barn, he speaks English, recommending an ointment, but there is no saying it in English. So, he says it in in Spanish: Cebo de Coyote con Aceite de Víbora. To the horses, he speaks […]
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