Like frightened birds after a hunter’s shot—My dreams scatter in flight when I open up my eyes[…]
The auction block still rides on the black backs of ghosts hurling themselves town to town […]
The most important piece of advice I got from my first mentor was to get as broad of an education as possible without diluting it.[…]
Since Paati died, fireworks were the only thing that could get Thatha up and out of bed, and the goggles were the only thing that let Amma let us keep watching the shows.[…]
In works like, The Hands of Time, I convey the delicate nature balance between life and death. In life, death is constantly brushing our fingertips. And yet, in death, our connection to life makes it so that we never truly die.[…]
Today’s human beings feel comfortable with their non-historical past, but during an ideological process and in deep connection with social events, the nature of these dreams changes and they are abstract.[…]
Simian Immunodeficiency Virus adapted to live in the body of a person, and then the window was pried
open: open to spread through the villages of Cameroon, and then the rest of Africa, and then the world
beyond, until it found its way to a club in the suburbs of New Orleans and into the lifeblood of the man
who lived next door, my uncle.[…]
how often and when to learn significant places significant conversations significant persons to provide personalized experiences relating building memories building navigation assembling itself language feelings to black one binary white zero[…]
Aditi Khorana grew up in India, Denmark, and New England, and has worked as a journalist for ABC News, CNN, and PBS, and also as a marketing consultant for Fox, Paramount, and Sony. All of this life experience adds up to a unique, empowering, fierce body of work, including two novels, Mirror in the Sky and Library of Fates […]
The chapped lips of last season’s flora, the winter-cracked cattails slowly recovering their limber. Today I saw a willow precisely […]
I take solace in knowing how to make my father’s chicken adobo, because when he died in 2017, it was one of the many dishes he had made for us that wasn’t lost to us forever with his sudden passing[…]
But I couldn’t put her away. I was mourning. And I needed to mourn. That’s healthy.[…]
Those calls have been fewer and farther between these last few weeks. I suspect you’ve got to realize that, but if I’m honest, I’ve stopped wondering who it is you’re fighting during your backroom breaks at Best Buy instead of reapplying to your undergraduate program. […]
I crouch before the fermentation cabinet every other morning to check on my scoby, the color of my kraut, to smell the bacterial funk, and each time I am transported.[…]
These older Mexican ladies can feel like their childhoods were important. Their childhoods had beauty; their childhoods are worthy of literature.[…]
I have found ways to navigate sex—and trauma—anew. The following series explores the pain of sexual violence as well as the rediscovery of my body.[…]
They grin—a subtle, instinctive apology offered on a crooked row of short, fat teeth screaming for braces and fluoride. Held out on a silver tray, the smile is meant to flatten the offense they don’t yet recognize. They’re too young and they don’t understand taxes or sex or the government or the reason they’re the ones chosen for the roles of Mary and Joseph in the Christmas play every year, but something about this feels right for them.[…]
During childhood I heard the stories about the shtetls and the pogroms that escalated to become the
Holocaust where 6 million Jews—two thirds of the Jewish population in Europe— were killed for no other
reason than for being Jewish.[…]
The restaurants are closed, shelves in certain parts of the stores are empty, people seem chaotic and self-motivated, uncertainty looms, media sources spouting contradictory “news” – such is life at the beginning of the quarantine for the Covid-19 pandemic.
I want our childhood back to watch the ice break off at the shoreline and float away when the sun begins to warm the waters of Lake Superior early spring. Or spend whole Saturdays planting the pink and purple candy-striped petunias you loved in flower boxes and along the borders of our little sidewalk. […]
He used to search desperately for them—these mysterious people—but their voices would fade out of earshot whenever he thought he might be getting close. But he knows they’re there.[…]
There is something wonderful about being able to write both fiction and nonfiction…. It does take
different kinds of brain work, which is really enjoyable.[…]
Well, it looks as though you have three choices. You can go to him as he orders; you can refuse,
be whipped, and then have him take you by force; or you can run away again.[…]
Part of me wanted to turn back, but I couldn’t look away. My camera was my shield. Hiding behind it made everything feel slightly less real, like I was watching a movie instead of the massacre of my own childhood.[…]
Everyday the author takes the bus like a distant hum, I love that. I love that somebody leaves the author a voicemail and doesn’t talk about pain as a thin golden feather. I love that the author calls back.[…]
I don’t even feel comfortable in public coughing,
Without someone trying to put a nail in it. And that’s nothing to sneeze at. No hand washing or hand sanitizer will clean you of your phobias.[…]
A literary and art journal
from the MFA community at
Antioch University Los Angeles.
We’ll keep you fed with great new writing, insightful interviews, and thought-provoking art, and promise with all our hearts never to share your info with anyone else.
Michael Milberger
Credit: Paige DePratter
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Credit Vladimir Levashov
Credit: Luke Peterson
Photo credit: Ryley Eden Priest 
Credit: Anamari Gaeta
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