Sometimes I have a problem with oversharing. The lady next to me at the nail salon did not need to know that I got a UTI from not going to the bathroom while I was teaching. Especially when she only asked if I liked being a teacher. I have a bad habit of revealing very […]
Originally from Moldova, Ruth Madievsky is the author of a poetry collection titled Emergency Brake (Tavern Books, 2016). Her poetry and fiction appear in Tin House, The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a second poetry collection and book of linked short stories. When […]
I am often surprised by how many people have heard of my hometown of Dayton, Ohio. Dayton once had a major role in innovation and the arts. The city lays claim to both the Wright Brothers and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Funk music was arguably birthed in West Dayton. Major companies like Mead, Reynolds and Reynolds, […]
“The map is not the territory”-Alfred Korzbyski This quote reveals the physical motivation behind my involvement in creating sculpture. The source of my ideas comes from nature and nature also provides the materials for the pieces themselves. Willow, dog fennel, phragmites, hibiscus, pine bark, bamboo and marsh elder are examples […]
Ming Holden’s essay collection is an experiment. Equal parts essay, memoir, and poetry, with a dash of fiction, Refuge: A Memoir bends genre to immerse readers into the lives of the refugees and political exiles Holden has worked with throughout her life. From Syria to Kenya to China, Holden explores the circular, repetitive trauma that refugees […]
[bilingual poetry] The first cable-car ride brings him before tourists, far above the daily concerns, where a trail climbs and winds in the shades of ancient woods. A trunk and moss can be heard, but many a tree leaf is gasping, when the largest deer on earth stops at six yards, watching. From top to […]
1. I didn’t mean to get serious about running. I try not to get too serious about anything. But here I am. As is the way with most drugs, the hobby was all fun and games until I was a junkie, the crazy kind of addict who wakes up on Thanksgiving morning and instead of […]
It was June 24, 1994. A Friday. And it was my last day in Cleveland. I was surrounded by stacks of boxes piled high in makeshift towers. I’d spent the last week shredding papers, dusting, and mopping. Toiling and cleaning was in my blood, gifted to me by my Caribbean ancestors. I was holding a […]
[translated poetry] He had said, My woman, come to the lamppost when the coldest night arrives / There will be a rock / Sit on it / Or at least set your heart on it / The fog will envelop you from all sides / On this canvas of fog, your breath will be visible like sweeps of […]
[creative nonfiction] Greg and I stroll the picnic grounds, slowly because it is my first post-surgical outing. His annual company picnics are always themed: Wild West with pony rides and barbeque and lasso contests; Summer Camp with canoeing and hot dogs; Carnival with actual fairway rides and cotton candy. This year, it’s Renaissance Faire, so […]
We weren’t supposed to be out after the streetlight came on. But here we were, my older brother and I, walking down the street to the corner store. Joey was supposed to walk me back home after getting me from my best friend Kayla’s house, but he had other plans. “I just have to meet […]
[translated poetry] I drank coffee with your devastated parents or something we called coffee: were you already different when we sat across from each other in my kitchen and you didn’t want to eat anything except a piece of chocolate, did you already have an eye on the reeds? I can’t tell .. was that […]
[fiction] Crusted half moons smeared down my thigh, bled through my tights in long, whispery scratches. Thigh skin bulged through tears in the fabric. When I ripped the tights off, blood pulled with them and the wounds were scab-less, fresh again. I wrestled on old jeans, jerked up one side, then the other, inched them […]
12. Two boys barely in their teens who want to be untethered, to fire a gun and become men in place of their missing fathers, climb the stairs to the apartment tower’s rooftop where lies hidden under a scorched plate of sheet metal is an old rifle, abandoned by a man now gone—dead, jailed, or […]
By the time I brought my son to vacation in Hawai’i, I knew something was wrong. With him, with me, with the world—take your pick. I remember it as perfect; the month we spent lost among the wild sunshine of the deep Pacific. A time outside of time. Our special little bubble of happiness when, […]
March 21st, 1982: Cardboard televisions. My father and I are putting together cardboard televisions. He flips one right side up, slips two thick square tabs into the hollow slots they’re meant to go inside. Flanigan’s Family Furniture in Jamaica, Queens, has started using these, and that’s where she got the idea. My mother. Except now, […]
[fiction] Til has just fallen asleep when an elderly woman bends down to the stroller and gushes, “What a putty baby. Dat a putty baby.” He’s asleep, I whisper, and could she please just fucking move along, too low for her to hear the violence in me I guess, because she’s just getting started. “Putty […]
[creative nonfiction] Now I’m able to just state the facts: My daughter goes to a school in the city, my son goes to the public high school. I try to leave it at that. I no longer feel compelled to go into all the rest. Before my daughter started coming home for visits, when she […]
What I miss most is the smell of my hometown. The mix of chile guaco, wood smoke, and masa seared into every cell of my body. On hot August days I miss the torrential afternoon storms of the wet season. Sometimes in my dreams I hear the click-click of beetle wings and see the steep […]
A man wearing a navy paisley bandana and wire-frame glasses pedaled his bike to the corner, stepped over his seat, and coasted on one foot to the bike rack at the side of the liquor store. He slotted his front wheel in the rack, strode four steps over to the unsheltered public payphone, lifted the […]
[fiction] You are in the car hurtling through real darkness—not in-the-city darkness—with your friend who has been dead and not on this earth for some time now. Your hands on the wheel, your dog in back, your friend beside you, hands folded neatly in her lap. She’s wearing the same white sneakers as always, faded […]
[fiction] Bill Withers pours through her window, a melody that sways with the breeze. Lovely Day. Bill knows that her gold-flecked curtains will emit the heavy sun shining against her walls. She stretches her body like a cat. Hell yeah, she is flexible these days. Certain things don’t matter anymore, the size of her ass, […]
I don’t know why I’m here with Emery, other than I am drunkish and sad. She’s ignoring my questions, hiding behind a screen. I ask her, “What are we?” She looks at me and says, “I’d tell you if I knew.” She’s tumbled in bed sheets, hair reaching over the plateau of pillow. The tendrils […]
[fiction] Lynette told me to drive her to Tompkins Square on Friday night so she could score some pot. This was during the early nineties, the very last days when New York was Scorsese City. You could buy almost anything you wanted off the street as long as you had the money and the connections. […]
You will oversleep, wake up disoriented in a too-quiet house. At first, you will only remember the dream, that scraping feeling of trying to scream but not making any sound. You will try to drag the details into your conscious brain, but they will evaporate as you become aware of the mattress springs pressing into […]
The Blackening (Or That Time It Wasn’t Cancer) My nipples started turning black a month or so before I hit forty. Well, not exactly black. Not then. Not at first. Just—dark? Deepest brown? Existential crisis grey? Forty? Is forty a color? I ignored it. That sounds crazier than it actually is—of course I didn’t […]
I was twenty-three and working as a caregiver to three autistic women in a house on Decatur Street. Jackie, Hazel, and Marcella had lived in institutions their whole lives, before the agency I worked for helped them get out and set up a life. None of them were verbal and they needed round-the-clock support. I did […]
Author’s Note: Names have been changed throughout this piece The dawn emerges, and, as if straight out of a movie, a rooster begins to crow. The rooster in question belongs to my neighbor, who is lucky enough to own several chickens. I’m in Gondama, a small town twenty kilometers from Bo, the second largest city […]
without permission or probation. if you can judge the pedigree of a windy day in April you may just get this. the same boy endless and radiant and doing exactly what a title as smooth as shea butter would suggest. sprinting across what little grass the west side has to brandish the opening of the […]
In cowhide suspenders, nine-year-old Xavier was running toward the village. A copy of the Reverend’s abridged bible bobbed in his hands like a fish struggling to return to the sea. He had forgotten to read the assigned chapter in the bible. Last night, captivated by the stars in the dark purple clouds around the moon, […]
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