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 […]
[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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
[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 […]
[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 […]
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 […]
[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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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). […]
As an artist and ecologically-minded humanist, I am interested in performing history and historiography through visual means, giving careful consideration to the materials I use. I am currently working on Talk Story, a multifaceted long-term project, spanning four continents and five centuries of territorial expansion and human movement […]
[fiction] An overcast day in early November: wolf-gray sky, scraps of cloud pasted above the ragged skyline of the city. Here, half-reclined on a worn green corduroy couch, furred belly bare beneath a struggling hem and a thick braid of drool making a moat of his shirt collar, is Sam, freshly awakened in the living […]
Education for Bastards Listen—you could be anyone. Other kids say they know their fathers, but marriage? That’s a knot made for plot twists. What’s better than Imagination? And her pedigree’s as full of holes as yours. She stretches across the unknown, she makes new stories, she flies through the galaxies and back. Her best friend […]
[creative nonfiction] Her father dies three times. The first time, in ‘69, she’s six, and her mother tells her, “They lost him; he’s missing.” But she knows they’ll find him, and he’ll find her, even after her mother packs a folded-over mattress and her three daughters in the back seat of her white VW bug […]
[poetry] I June 25, 2013 i’m in Mom’s office helping her pack for her new home the last home where she’s going home to die I want you to have this she says handing me a yellow post-it it’s a quote that she wrote “In the end it’s not the years in your life that […]
This collection of short stories never shies away from the human potential for life-destroying darkness. Stories such as “Between,” “The Torturer’s Wife,” “Invasion: Evening: Two,” “Woman Impossible Task,” “He Who Would have Become ‘Joshua’ 1791,” and “Out There” confront the evils of war, political torture, slavery, and violence perpetrated against the gay community. Glave insists […]
Into The Fifth speaks to the force of a paradigm shift, as I experience the world transitioning from one dimension to the next. During the creative process, I experimented with sculpture, photography, homemade activated charcoal paint, ceramics, 24k gold, and collage, allowing my creative process to flow through me, without or without thought. In each painting […]
Welcome to our new Amuse-Bouche occasional series, Litdish. This is a solicited series of interviews with writers and artists in conversation with our staff about literature, art, social justice, and community activism. Please enjoy. ~The Editors Gayle Brandeis is a poet, writer, and activist. She is the author of the poetry collections The Selfless Bliss of […]
Blue-green watery globe tugging to a red core we are a distant comet, white cloud of unburnished rocks, frisking the heavens for an arc to earth, sea, home. Green-brown Palestine, cactus fruit and wild thyme, olive orchards, cypress trees… we travel on your mountain tops tethered by voices from suitcases and the yaw of blackened […]
[translated fiction] It’s my weekend with my daughter. Vilhelmína is standing between us wearing a Batman T-shirt and a wool jacket, a red tulle skirt and new rubber boots. She’s also wearing a backpack that’s much too big for her scrawny back with a decorative little umbrella hanging off it, and I feel a tug […]
[poetry] Husband Ghazal He who cuts the head from the chicken gets the heaping plate; he breaks a wing with a quick snap, slurps marrow, gravy dripping. He falls asleep without swinging. We sing. I am wrist-bound to static eternity—like Daphne, but a plastic houseplant. Don’t put your hair up he says as he slinks […]
If the title of his childhood memoir needs clarification, before launching into his story of what it was like to grow up at the end of apartheid in South Africa, Trevor Noah includes conditions of the Immorality Act, 1927: The act of “illicit carnal intercourse” between a [white] European with a [black] native “shall be […]
I was born and raised in Shanghai. By the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping initiated a more open-door policy, but I still had a deep desire to experience America as well as Western culture. Immigrating to Boston to study art in graduate school, I discovered a more complex society than I had imagined. Longing for a democratic system, I wasn’t prepared for the magnitude of consumption […]
[creative nonfiction] To My Daughter, and All the Daughters, This is the letter I should have gotten from my mother, and that she should have gotten from her mother, and that should have been passed down through the ages like baking cloths, or photo albums, or funeral cards. It is the letter that tells you, […]
Dana Johnson is the writer of the short story collections Break Any Woman Down and In the Not Quite Dark, and the coming-of-age novel Elsewhere, California, which was nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California, and her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Callaloo, […]
[creative nonfiction] I should be writing. You are not here. For the next one hundred and twenty minutes, you are not my job. “Are you going to the coffee office?” you asked on the way to preschool, your cute phrase for what I do. Yes, yes. Three days a week, three slivers of a life […]
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh is a work of transgressive fiction that follows the life of heroin user Mark Renton, a.k.a. “Rents,” and his friends known as the Skag Boys. The novel takes place in Scotland with occasional trips to London. Trainspotting is told from several different points of views and includes a revolving cast of […]
[poetry] I’m on a bus reading Langston Hughes’s articles from The Chicago Defender and I realize it’s like I have no shadow. I’m on a bus sitting where I want to and in this article it’s 1946, and Hughes is in a restaurant and the hostess insists on seating him at the back of an […]
With a background in geology, Rick Bass splits his time between environmental activism and writing. His work crosses genres and includes non-fiction, essays, novels, and short stories. You can find his work widely published and acclaimed in journals and magazines such as Esquire, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, […]
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