The day your mother has a stroke, you have to admit you know almost nothing.It starts when you receive a text from your sister that lights up your phone in the darkness of a movie theater: Mom is in the hospital. […]
we have folded into a day
where we can see any
color we want: royal purple,
recesses of indigo, […]
My feet
Are wearied and jaded
As a pair,
one incites the other […]
Your eyes go suddenly vacant,
mouth slack,
expression anxious.
You search,
search for a word …
My words held up a mirror and exhibited the same qualities she’d always instilled in me, one last time. Two weeks later, she let go. She found that bravery I’d asked her to, our bravery. Her last lesson to me was how to love myself again […]
That we are in the hands of a master storyteller who writes with a poet’s precision about fractious themes is clear. With a seer’s intuition, [Vuong] guides us into uncomfortable terrains of migration and displacement, violence and love, trauma and loss, poverty and addiction, the body and identity, queerness and masculinity.
This whole situation was like trying to find all the hidden items of Zelda. Can’t you enjoy the game without discovering all the secrets? Not for me. To truly know myself, to be able to successfully walk through my life, I had to understand my parents’ programming.[…]
In this cage of preconceived notions,
—in the crevices of God’s palm,
You’ve seen me wallow in my sorrows in the cortex
And scream to the heavens of insanity […]
I’m very interested in the inner worlds of other people—that’s the main reason why impressionistic portraiture is the basis of my artwork. I deny the stereotypes of appearance and gender and paint boys with makeup and earrings […]
I was 16. It was fall of my senior year, and I was applying to colleges. But I knew where I wanted to go. For most of my life, I’d lived down the street from my dream school, an ivy-covered university that loomed large in my consciousness. My father was affiliated with it, and it played a central role in my family’s life—we went there for plays, exhibits, sports events. I’d even dressed up on Halloween as the school’s star football player when I was a kid. I was sure this university was my destiny […]
trans·gen·der | \ tran(t)s-ˈjen-dər, tranz-\
Definition of transgender
1. a : of, relating to, or being a person who is vulnerable : see OTHER
// like a fetus or an orioles’ egg it is fragile & frequently unborn […]
[fiction] the grandma would cut nopales from her backyard nopalera. a tower of pencas. the long blade biting its way through the stem. but it was infected. white pimples growing on its shell. when i would pop them. they would release a wave of purple. staining the smooth penca with sin […]
Shame defined my womanhood, then motherhood when I gave birth to my first son two years later. The vessel in me expanded and shrunk, carved and bubbled, carrying the scars, my past becoming my present: a hysterectomy.[…]
[creative nonfiction] In China, you are expected to conceal your emotions. Sometimes, it helps to comfort yourself with a fictitious, whimsical story on death, like that of the bone carver. But when you are helpless, lost in the sea of your emotions, there is nothing left to do but to let the waves pull you down […]
There is no lifestyle; there are rules that you set for yourself. Be reasonable with those expectations and know who is setting them. Keep reviewing those expectations, especially the ones you’ve set for yourself, to make sure they are realistic and not harmful […]
When asked, I almost always give up and offer the term “a nonsexual orgy.” People enter a dance studio in a leafy Boston suburb and commence to touch, play, and move with each other’s bodies. What else should I call it? The people who come here often know it by its technical name: A Contact Improv Workshop. The people who […]
[creative nonfiction] Nothing ostentatious, nothing reminiscent of the young man who, after a weekend of clubbing, raved about the bodies of the men he met. “They had bodies of death,” he laughed, never realizing the irony of foreshadowing. No amount of make-up could cover the Kaposi’s, that’s what we called them then, on his nose. It bloomed with the deep purple and distinct outline of an O’Keefe flower […]
I wondered what it must be like to live every day looking death so directly in the face. I stepped closer. The marble he was cleaning had long ago lost its sheen, but he cleaned with a vigor that defied all skepticism as if he would only stop working when at last he could look down and see the reflection of the sky […]
[creative nonfiction] The magnolia tree in my front yard blossomed in early March; the branches weighed down with huge white flowers, only a breath away from the ivy-coated ground. My brother and I used to swing from these branches, flipping over them and putting our weight on thinner […]
[fiction] The messenger arrives early in the morning. He hands Rachel an envelope. Inside the envelope is a letter printed on lengths of tape and pasted on a form. In the letter, there are three words. Aleph Friedman Killed.
A recent DNA analysis told me I’m “less likely to freckle,” “more susceptible to male pattern baldness,” and have “a stronger tendency to be agreeable.” Coincidentally, I do have very few freckles, am shedding hair by the fistful, and when in the right mood, I can be as congenial as Sandra Bullock in a rom-com flick […]
I shut his blue eyes,
my hand still enough
to keep each iris closed.
I have learned both
to tie a curtain and silence […]
Nesting Matryoshka dolls were originally created as an homage to family, each doll at home inside a loving matriarch. Now an important part of Russian culture, the first sets were designed as toys. Traditional sets consisted of eight hand-painted pieces: the largest a Babushka, holding a rooster with a headscarf tied […]
I. “In the stillness his face was inclined towards me, while the moon’s clear beams shone, And his arm lay lightly over my breast—and that night I was happy.”
that night i was happy. and it was not moonlight i saw but instead the orange glow of the lights[…]
Because nursing homes were for gringos,
my grandfather spent his last years
on the couch, idle, silent, drooling
as he watched novelas, old episodes
of Cops, and—as hour after hour passed— […]
1
Google: How early do girls masturbate?
in her eighth year / maybe earlier / low tides birthed: a lotus / splitting legs / to conch shell murmurs / she
swirls / her lotus / chews mattress / her lotus / bends pillow / her lotus / rubs its cheek / against raggedy
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/ spills / from mute dolly / yet / no cotton / will enter girl / enter lotus / tampons are phallic / kabardaar
[fiction] One morning, there are people in her house. Caren lives alone. She never married and her last long-term thing ended five years ago. She’s fine. She likes it: those early hours sipping coffee, her cat, Guster, winding through her bare legs. She can wear her rattiest t-shirts, hum off-key while getting ready. But now […]
I was first introduced to Issac Bailey at the Chicago Tribune Printers Row Lit Fest last June, where he spoke about his book My Brother Moochie: Regaining Dignity in the Face of Crime, Poverty, and Racism in the American South. My Brother Moochie is a powerful, personal exploration of race and racism and of the […]
1. Despite my protests, neither my mother nor my father will concede the point. I was not, according to them, in my right mind when I called from a hospital bed at Ajou University Hospital. They detected something. An aberrance. Like an incoherence of speech, or a delirious register of voice. It’s only natural they […]
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