[fiction] Estoy corriendo on a dirt road feeling the right side of my face swelling up. Brittle and stiff mesquite se rodearon el camino. Trailers float on the mesquite milas aparte, solos, escuchando los vultures crowing as they circle. And montaña morenas stand silent squatting el cielo azul on their jagged backs. Oigo un grito and a […]
Since coming here, the bright red-orange of my skin has begun to fade into a washed out but stubborn stain. The gold of my eyes, too, has dulled to a yellowish brown. This place—they call it a school. We’ve been here almost a year now, and on my first day of class, as we sat in the rows of desks facing a woman with colorless skin and yellow hair, I raised my hand and asked, “Why is it spelled with an h?”
Up the stairs coiled around the hotel my new friend Frank and I are lamenting that there is no gym after all—he lamenting— I going along—at my door I half stick the key in, he asks again about how to iron his pants, I have these pants with a crease—he uses his hand to saw […]
A beautiful man with a rich beard and a nose sharp enough to slice a tomato stood ahead of Viju at the Falafel cart. He looked a lot like the man he’d seen Gita with at the cinema house last week, his Gita, at least she used to be. Viju grunted before he could catch […]
Ben Loory is a good guy who writes great short stories. The end. If it were only that easy. Behind his smoothly carved stories, Loory revises and refines drafts sometimes for years before they’re finished. A few, he writes in one afternoon. His characters are compelling; nameless, often faceless, possibly mirrors of ourselves—even if ducks […]
[fiction] Dad and I move wicker baskets from our van to the tent. Dad’s jerking baskets too hard. Apples fall out and roll across pavement. “Strawberries go on the short table,” I say. He’d placed them on the higher table, where we put the jam display. “Move them then,” he grunts. He pulls out another […]
Dolores stood beside Ruth in the two-car garage, their polarized trifocals not yet adjusted to the darkness. Dolores wore a sun visor from the 2010 New Mexico Bowl game where the Lobos had lost miserably. Ruth had on her fishing hat with numerous fishing flies dangling from it. She was so tall and skinny she […]
[creative nonfiction] It was true it was Christmas. It was my first day in Phnom Penh. My boyfriend bought our tickets for Cheong Ek, a genocide memorial site. Yes, perhaps I was an artist when I agreed. My boyfriend adjusted the headphones, his best friend took a Klonopin. The tour began with facts. A curator’s […]
Not a pyre, but a chimney, a beetle shaking mercilessly on top of my doormat to the sound of its own catharsis a tongue my neck both hands shaking exactly the same. My teeth as antenna & my cords wings Sing I watched a beetle die today; not a crate not a crypt not a […]
[fiction] January 1 Liz: Happy new year!!! Alyssa: Not yet here ☹ What’s the future like? Liz: Wild. People are leaving this party in hovercars. Pretty sure we just achieved world peace. We all have teleportation bracelets now. Alyssa: Great! So you can come celebrate with me? Liz: I wish! “Lyyyssaaa.” Isaac drops onto the […]
The Bretspars lived in a tumbledown Cape Cod, but they were a long way from Massachusetts. The sky was the color of faded denim, not New England grey. The land green and yielding, not hard and unforgiving. The blood red and pumping, not Brahmin blue. A shelterbelt screened the Bretspars’ home from the road, spared […]
[fiction] When he was nine, he tried to catch a couple. He thought the Red Bishops, with their striking red and black plumage, would look lovely in his cage. He sat high on his perch in the mango tree, watching them fly wild and free, chirping busily, in and out of the reeds in the […]
Real boy the love I have made to you is unremarkable, as it should be in a perfect world, impossible to tell where you end and I begin. Real boy I have recessed in your nation, your looted land, pronounced it dead, & closed the borders I once bled for. Real boy I dream of […]
On August 14th, I had the honor of interviewing Jeff Shotts, Executive Editor of Graywolf Press in Minneapolis, MN, by phone. A native of McPherson, Kansas, and graduate of Washington University’s MFA program, Shotts began his career as an editorial assistant before going on to edit poetry and nonfiction. After hearing his guest lecture during […]
[fiction] Feed “#DrunkAsFuckGirl” DAF!!! LMAO! idk how i feel about what’s going on, but you should of not drank so much… ur last night on earth wuz a good one. way to go down! DAF!!! we should of charged that bitch extra! some people just deserve to have dicks rubbed on their face. LOL!!! dont […]
And the first words out of my mouth do not buck into a shield, do not blast his ears with refusal, not never, in my quiet defense something un-proud: it’s not even Muslim, as I convert that s to a z, and twist, twist my hair all of it uncovered for his ease and a […]
[fiction] How do I explain the butterfly if I don’t explain the heat? My sister and I were walking to the corner store to buy snacks with money from my grandma, who was dying. She had been dying for as long as I could remember though, so it didn’t really bother me. What did bother […]
Ahsan opened the sliding glass door and stepped out. He inhaled deeply and broke into a cough. The air was thick, murky and filled with an unrelenting stink—as if a gang of motorcyclists had fired up their engines and aimed into the yard. Ahsan covered his mouth and walked out farther. His mother had explicitly […]
Khadijah Queen (to remix two very famous quotes by Walt Whitman and Lionel Blue) contains multitudes like everybody else, only more so. In one sense, the scope of her work is so radically diverse in form and genre that it’s difficult imagining all of it coming from one author. Queen describes a literary life that […]
perched in a cricket cage the canary waits to read your life you stand, sunbound eating mamey, guanaba favas con chile, pan dulce drinking agua pura y piña drop a few pesos in the guira the marimba comes to life two men like a wind-up toy or well-trained spider monkeys play Guadalajara, two mallets in […]
[fiction] There is a room with twenty desks. Five across, four deep. “Small class size. You should feel lucky,” the principal tells him. Each desk with a book: America the Beautiful: A Sweeping History 1776-2027. Red, white, blue, and all in mint condition. They better stay that way, for his sake. The desktops are all […]
[fiction] Mā explained over the phone: a violist sprained his wrist, tumbling after a volleyball, and the octet needed to practice with a replacement before Chinese school celebrated chūnjié tomorrow. She had a habit of molding requests into commands after several hours, so I saved time by consenting. It did excuse me from the January […]
You’ve probably read David Ulin’s work in The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, The Paris Review, Black Clock, Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, Zyzzyva, Columbia Journalism Review, The Believer, and NPR’s All Things Considered. Ulin has also been a contributor to docufilms, such as Lost LA and the upcoming Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in […]
I still remember the moment I first swiped one of Francesca Lia Block’s books from my big brother’s bookshelf. Splayed out across my family’s living room floor in our downtown Los Angeles apartment, I devoured the modern fairy tales in Blood Roses with a hunger I hadn’t realized was there. Moving on to her other […]
[translated poetry] Excuse Us Excuse us for fleeing the wars that you fed with your own arms Excuse us for getting poisoned with the toxic waste buried by your powerful industries Excuse us if you’ve bled out our land, depriving us of any possible resource Excuse our poverty daughter of your richness of your neo-colonialisms […]
I slide a pinky beneath the leather band of my love’s watch and feel his humid skin. I love this virgin bracelet around his wrist, the manacle of tan line where he unbuckles the hours and becomes master of our time together. We divide one moment from another with embraces, laughter, kisses, breath. My body […]
[translated fiction] “Martín!” “Ñoraa!” “You think the river’s gone up?” “Definitely, the snowmelt’s really letting loose down the sierra, bursting like you wouldn’t believe.” “Will the cows go into the woods?” “I couldn’t hold them back even if I tried.” “But be careful on the way back, son, the river’s treacherous.” “The river won’t get […]
Yoga I have bad memories of ballet class, and isn’t yoga like dancing in a way, teaching the muscles how to lengthen, how to lean, how to turn elastic as rubber bands? All my springs are coiled tight for bouncing. My love even calls me Tigger sometimes. I watch her step out of the studio […]
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