[creative nonfiction] When I was seventeen, my daily food consumption consisted of two apples per day, nothing more and nothing less. Every single calorie that I ate was tracked, measured, and promptly exterminated like a nasty virus through rigorous exercise. Every aspect of my life revolved around numbers: calories in, calories out, how many minutes […]
Weight First thing you learn is to swallow a fist/ that sets its aim/ on the white manager who calls you/ so articulate/ as if the notion is as rare as a nun in full habit/ or unicorns/ I learned to play house/ with dolls I’d rather bury/ and frilly girls I’d prefer to avoid/ […]
Valeria Luiselli earned her PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University and has received awards from the Los Angeles Times, the Azul Prize, and the National Book Foundation. Her books include Sidewalks, Faces in the Crowd, The Story of My Teeth, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, and now, Lost Children […]
My work is a connection between nature, textile, and culture. It combines my own worlds—the rich landscape that surrounds me on the mountains of West Galilee in Israel, my expertise in the textile industry and textiles, and my Hungarian descent. This nature-textile-culture composition isn’t a trivial one. It can even be confusing. And yet, it generates a sense […]
Nancy Au‘s writing appears or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, The Cincinnati Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Catapult, Lunch Ticket, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others. She has an MFA from San Francisco State University where she taught creative writing. In the summers, she teaches creative writing (to biology majors!) at California State University Stanislaus. She is co-founder […]
[fiction] You sit in a Goodwill engulfed in the sadness emitted by the abandoned objects, each with their own story you’re sure, and the dejected shoppers. Your chosen object is a $20 chair, cracked red leather outlined by shining buttons. You listen to a man, ratty t-shirt and balding blonde hair, sitting in a different […]
[translated poetry] Thousands of Chinese Acres of Spring When the budding of a tree isn’t closely observed Rapeseed flowers have unfolded the season by their full blossoms The golden dream of the earth thus rolls out under the cloud flowers Is woven in the wind and undulates to the farthest in March Rapeseed flowers have […]
[creative nonfiction] 1: Adab Being with family is the ultimate exercise in learning good adab. There is no simple translation for that Arabic word. Adab. A-da-ba. Turn it around, and you get ba-da-a: beginning. But you live in the West now. Your parents lifted you out of that loving, prickly embrace and introduced you to […]
Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions is indeed an essay responding to the absurdity of 40 certain inquiries. Yet, it is much more than that. The “tell me how it ends” refrain quotes a plaintive request from Luiselli’s daughter, who was five years old when Luiselli served as a […]
It wasn’t just the one earthquake. It was the one before it as well, which woke me from a sound sleep. The curtains were swinging as if there was a breeze but moving the wrong way, side-to-side, and then I remembered that I kept the windows closed at night because of the mosquitoes. I heard the doorman screaming and that must have got me going […]
Ma Rainey on my parade, anyday. Wear suits to that rodeo and yield it your birthing hips. Sway ‘em on stage and own the gaze of them who owned you. Heaven can’t be white when you are nutmeg ground for God. Speak easy to me and rest real hard, tomorrow will be another long one. […]
Jody Chan is a writer and organizer based in Tkaronto/Toronto. They are the poetry editor for Hematopoeisis, a 2017 VONA alum, and the 2018 winner of the Third Coast Poetry Contest, selected by Sarah Kay. Their first chapbook is forthcoming in 2018 with Damaged Goods Press, and their poetry is published in BOAAT, Looseleaf Magazine, […]
I’ve been awake so long that my computer illuminates the wet of its reservoir with a whisper: The last time I was out on a Friday night I was taking transit on shabbos. It’s against halacha to kill yourself so I’m waiting for Masada, praying for a neighbour to pick my name– To bleed out […]
Claire Wahmanholm’s debut poetry collection Wilder at times feels like a bedtime story, full of ghostlike beings, ash-blanketed landscapes, corpse-flowers, and Cassandran prophecies echoing through it all. That might sound enchanting and more than a little spooky, but quickly things feel uncomfortably familiar. Isn’t this our world? Are those our voices? Or worse, those of […]
[fiction] It smells the same, even after all these years—the smell of tens of thousands of prayers exhaled above palms pressed to the heart, thousands of bare feet padding into the prayer room, thousands upon thousands of incense sticks lit in front of the same statues, day in and day out. How could this building […]
In Michelle Whittaker’s debut collection, Surge, we begin in the after. After what is not as important as the life lived after trauma—an afterlife. Though we arrive having already crossed this border safe and sound, an epigraph from Susan Sontag reminds us that we’re still dual citizens: passport carriers from “the kingdom of the well” […]
you have to learn to live with emptiness my mother told me I drank water when I was hungry I drank water the way people hustle onto trains rushing to another city the rain begins in one window but always finds its way to all the others your dog scratches at the white couch I […]
Dorothy Chan is the author of Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, Forthcoming March 2019), Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). She is the Editor of The Southeast Review. Visit her website at dorothypoetry.com. 10 Questions for Dorothy Chan: 1. What’s the most recent thing you’ve written? I’m currently working on my […]
Ana mainly explores and depicts themes that have a social element, applying elements of tactile reality such as collage and found objects to issues and situations (non-materials, intangibles) to the reality of today’s society. She is interested in exploring how perspectives work with human conditioning […]
[creative nonfiction] This is the year I got old. The orthopedist says there is little I can do. Not about growing older—I already know that—but about my left shoulder. It’s not the athletic injury I thought it was, and there’s no definitive cure. It simply has to run its course, he says, dismissively. The only […]
chews on the strange stillness of his quiet unravel. she knows the undoing—like thread—will be slow & always. same as when he first moved inside of me—i remember. the both of us wide open, one exhale after the other scrawled between my legs. the ground sweats against my foot, familiar with the work. all things […]
Living on Sandy Hook Bay in New Jersey gave me a personal stake in global warming. Superstorm Sandy took a devastating toll on our neighborhood and our beach. I completed the Rising Series five years before Sandy. The series helped me to express the fear 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina imprinted on my psyche. Each year as the destruction from storms stretches around the globe […]
Note from a Loving Friend I. For weeks, high school girls giggled, slipped folded notes to each other, their noses pruned, leaving me on the outskirts, alien that I was. True I had my green card, always in my wallet, but still I did not know why I felt alone in their company. I read […]
Sherri Cornett’s German immigrant and pioneer roots are set deep into the homesteads around the small south Texas town of Cuero, where both of her parents grew up, met, and married. By the time she settled in Billings, Montana, in 1993, she had lived in eleven cities and, in some of those, several homes. Out of […]
I create art to inspire change. I draw inspiration from artists whose creations are a means to construct dialogue around taboo topics. My art is focused on societal issues that are expressed through painting. Hiding in Plain Sight is a body of work that documents the people of our century, in order for future generations to have an understanding of our present-day experiences. These portraits represent the urban community […]
[fiction] 4 My babysitter is an old bat. Old and mean. She makes me drink water standing by the kitchen table. She won’t let me sit down. After I drink, she pushes me back outside to play. She won’t let me in until lunch at eleven. I play with the other kids in the yard. […]
ache when you came here, you were a shadow on the wall of the episcopalian church on the water, fourteen hours away. you had your mother’s face and father’s eyes. limbs that bent into edges and straw, skinny red lines frowning across your left wrist. a hunger you couldn’t name yet rustled beneath your ribs. […]
Tami Haaland is the author of three poetry collections, What Does Not Return (2018), When We Wake in the Night (2012), and Breath in Every Room (2001), winner of the Nicholas Roerich First Book Award. She earned a BA and MA in English literature from the University of Montana and a MFA in creative writing and literature from Bennington College. Her work […]
A four-letter word that ends in “k.” That’s how my friend, Kristi, used to refer to the color pink. In her youth she was a competitive swimmer, because it was the one sport open to both boys and girls. She writes: “A touch with the fingertips on the kicking feet of the swimmer in front […]
[creative nonfiction] Where did it begin, the pain, the images that haunt me? — La Prieta, Gloria E. Anzaldúa Tyler Clementi was eighteen in 2010. Before he ever became eighteen, he was a toddler. He was a kid with exceptional abilities, and he was known to have taught himself how to play the violin, accompanying […]
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