[translated poetry] Chinese Fable When I was small my father’s coworker ran off coming back with one of those briefcases full of money close, smutty talk filled our town about what he’d done to get it he smiled and disappeared again Next we heard he’d been sentenced to death for drug trafficking a family member […]
[fiction] Your lips taste of dust and salt. Your baby hairs glisten, limp commas and parentheses. In the mirror, you examine your freckles. You avoid looking at your chest. You dip your foot in the water (too hot), force yourself to keep it in, smothering it with one hand. You sink deeper into the bath, […]
“The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and […]
[translated poetry] I Given in measurement. Play seasons. Beneath bushes of fog, face blades, get knotty, all the while be back, pelvis, exchange of oxygen and photosynthesis. Lust as shears. Slight air supply, then: Breathe, raise arms shoulder-high, a beelined shoot axis. Put up defense with leaves (thorns, bugs, spiderwebs), evaporation of the slightest. The […]
Every year when my breast is squeezed into the machine and the woman behind the Plexiglas tells me not to move, when the radiologist reads the film and says, “You’re high risk,” I’m forced to think of Barbara, my maternal aunt, who found a lump at fifty-six, the age I am now. My mammogram happens […]
[translated poetry] He was the same as other people who know nothing about the white gray glass: about the flat drop of sameness in a frame of white-lacquered window like a gray block of longing lying in a day rectangle of colored dough of encounters. He has installed the window panes in a […]
My daughter’s hand was gone. It took me only moments to slide coins across a counter on Santa Cruz’s boardwalk. When I dropped my hand back, hers was missing. In my left hand, I found the familiar grip of her five-year-old brother, Austin. As I used my chin to snap my wallet, I groped around […]
It was the middle of the day on a Friday when the breast cancer nurse called. I’d forgotten she was going to follow up; two weeks before I’d spent a really uncomfortable hour in an MRI machine where they took biopsies of both breasts and then scanned them. A lovely radiology nurse named Asha stayed […]
Call me Ismail, not Ishmael, which rhymes with wish fail, or Tom, Dick, or Harry, which rhyme with nothing that rings true to me, just because you cannot be bothered to learn to pronounce my name. It goes like this, three separate syllables: Is—like the prolonged break of a wave; ma—half of Mama; il—like a […]
[self-translated poetry] Roses and spines The widow’s shaven head Welcomes the knights of the apocalypse Sunbeams Arrows of the day The husband’s soul Escapes from the body The widow’s shaven head Welcomes the knights of the apocalypse Antidote He was handsome but ”la fille de Joie” [1] did not let herself go. Love is […]
Aesculus glabra: My father, a tall, fat-fingered guy with a stomach that fell over his belt buckle who used to hold my entire hand in his palm, rubbed his thumb against the smooth side of his index finger. He had been sitting in the beige recliner with his eyes glued to the television set. In […]
1981 When I am born in Taos, New Mexico, following my parents’ raucous 1970s commune living, my mom and dad agree they will not raise me with any religion. This means I will not learn the story of the Garden of Eden and the snake that goads Eve to eat the apple until much, much […]
1. The City on the Hill haunted by all manner of gunshots & protest signs & constricted throats of umbrage. Pundit wolves gnawing at the ballet- slippered sheath of flesh-glazed bones: Poverty is a state of mind. The cloy of fear a cheap perfume-scented cover for panic wafting from corporate person-hoods of deceit & profit […]
If you ask me now, I could still do it. Not all of it, of course—not now, not anymore. The more esoteric things—the notes for B minor, the exactitude between allegro and allegretto—those have long since been forgotten, faded with time and disuse. But hand me the sheet music, my bent Bach primers and blue Schumann […]
I took BART into San Francisco to do my writing work today. It was late morning so the train was fairly empty. I sat down, pressed my earphones in, and listened to music while I rode from the East Bay into the City. That train line stays above ground for most of the way, dips […]
The End of Cursive One day, fog rolls up from the pond’s dull mouth, skims our face, dissipates. The songbirds appear misplaced, greedy. How quickly the sparrows drop pathside to scratch for winged seeds lying golden among the goose turds. The fog’s unraveling strands are cursive, you say, scrawled in a vanishing ink. I recall […]
In the house I share with five people, I spearhead the vegetable garden every year and it always causes me more anxiety than you would think a garden should. Collaborations are difficult and we are each so busy. Everyone wants to eat lots of food from the garden whether or not these foods are suited […]
[fiction] Kamla has been through labor five times before in the past thirteen years, but the pain is still unforgiving, shaking and splitting her body. The village lady-doctor, Doctorni, fans Kamla’s face with a tattered punkah in the tiny two-room hospital in Bihar, India, and asks the tall nurse to boil some water. The nurse […]
It comes as a surprise to many American friends that I, their Canadian friend, have been stressed about maintaining my visa status ever since I crossed the border in 2009. “But you’re Canadian,” they say, as if Canadian is American. “Can’t you just get citizenship already?” as if I enjoy worrying about employment sponsorship year […]
[fiction] My father is home. I find his jacket and his cane and his wool hat piled at the door. There is a melted snow path that leads into the house. It’s been a few days since I’ve seen him, but I feel a sense of happiness that he was able to take his morning […]
This morning, while having my Keurig coffee, and slathering extra crunchy peanut butter on over-priced cinnamon bread, I heard the 911 call made by the Parkland, Florida shooter a few months before he entered the school and killed 17 people. The television newscaster announced that it was “coming up next,” so I patiently waited for […]
it is three o’clock in the afternoon i am asleep when your principal calls the day has eaten its way through my eyelids you cannot know the little things when you call me i am asleep it is the only thing that stops the crying you cannot know the little things how easily i come […]
I’ve been fascinated with water conservation since before I could see over the bathroom sink. While my mother was brushing her teeth, if the tap was still running, I’d stand on my tiptoes and twist the faucet shut. “Wasteful,” I‘d say. She’d look at me with a foamy half-smile and spit into the basin. Or […]
[creative nonfiction] “I ain’t got no food in the refrigerator,” Auntie Jill’s voice barks from my phone. As a kid, she terrified me—and still does, at forty-three. I reduce the volume to one bar. We are planning my stay with her in Detroit over Memorial Day. To friends, I’ve dubbed this sojourn a Guilt Trip, […]
I recently made a list of things I have done in the past ten months and seventeen days. Exactly ten months and seventeen days ago, I woke up in my apartment in Indianapolis to a loud thunderstorm and with a killer flu. Coincidentally, this was the day that I was supposed to move to Los […]
Summer of the three-cylindered engine, weeks spent thumping the wheel to tinny songs with a revolver stashed in my trunk. Johnnie on Snake Hill, pouring gas on the armrests of an old recliner, setting it on fire, watching the polyester open like a sore. Off 280, river scum lapping over rocks, their gray faces stained […]
Where is the most public place you’ve puked? With this year’s especially infectious flu season, I’ve found that sharing war stories of vomit (and some might say valor) can be especially inspirational. Physically and verbally, illness is purged from the system. From hurling and humiliation, we find humor in our humanity. Or, at the very […]
Cast away the coins closing your lids. Roll off the stones weighing your limbs. This is what we know: Every Good Book when in doubt is named again. We inherit the sins of our glossolalia, secreting the Divine like sex. The seat of the soul is in the genitals, the road to Mecca, Jerusalem, Damascus […]
I am in constant pursuit of an escape route. Since my father’s passing in 2012, I have moved a total of seven times. Arizona to California, up to Idaho and back down to Phoenix again. My living map is a zig-zag of dots and scattered lines spanning the western US. This February, I relocated my […]
torrin a. greathouse (she/her or they/them pronouns) is a genderqueer trans woman & cripple-punk from Southern California. Her work is published or forthcoming in Bettering American Poetry, Muzzle, Redivider, BOAAT, Waxwing, The Offing, Frontier, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She is the author of two chapbooks, Therǝ is a Case That I Ɐm(Damaged Goods, 2017) and boy/girl/ghost (TAR Chapbook Series, 2018). […]
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