As I arrive at the Institute and the heater sinks me in stuffy-warm air, I realize I haven’t spoken to you in nearly six years. It’s an icy day. The snow stacks knee-high, floods walkways, turning them to marsh, and the sky is empty—pale white like a beluga whale.
Imagine a world in which removing your lover’s eye is normal.
You don’t come from this world, but at a house party in New Jersey, in an apartment across the street from an A & P, you meet someone who does. You’re sitting on someone’s bed, half-drunk and navigating a potential threesome, when they walk in, sunglasses on indoors at 11pm, holding a bottle of beer in a way that judges you.
Sometimes my breath catches in my throat and won’t let go. The only real danger in this world is sleeping though it seems as if the humidifier is breathing along with us. Can you feel it?[…]
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.[…]
Anna Wang is a high school student from Illinois. Her writing has been recognized by […]
“The idea that poetry might not just be beautiful, but that it also might do something, is very important…It might help change the way we think about the world we live in, or the world that we’d like to live in.”
“If Jesus were to compile his top ten grave moral concerns in the United States, most assuredly on that list would be the growing gulf between the haves and the have-nots and the huge disparity that grows all the time…as well as the death penalty.”
—1— Twenty minutes after I picked up my mother at the El Plumerillo airport in Mendoza, Argentina, we heard a popping sound near the back of our rental car. When the Chevy Corsica began to drag, I slowed down. A man of about thirty, with curly black hair, a pale face, and wide, excited eyes […]
The resort guard, who protects whites and other rich people on the island, leans against the beach access gate and pulls his cap low over his face to watch me with eyes I can’t see.
Every night the train rattles along the West 4 Street platform
like some futuristic bull pushing archaeological trash
through the catacombs of the city.
Which is a word that means ghost, as it wanders, so much blown trash, soulful only as you make something of it, interrupting its leanings, a physical event and vulnerabilities, of buildings and populations. Budgetary allocations are patterns, they originate in the popular will and the dirt pressed back, or down, it’s so much work, […]
As I was walking through the Springdale Mall somewhere outside Pittsburgh down into the belly of the world, I made a word my friend with my breathless mouth. No one knows why it all turned upside down to keep both of us amused, in chains, and capable of saying anything — as […]
Tell her goodbye when you see her because sometimes it’s best to start with the ending & work in reverse. I know a thing or two about phases said the moon after no one asked it anything at all. I feel bad about the things that I said but also whatever I didn’t. Tell […]
Their pilot Mulligan was only crazy for golf, practicing his swing whenever he could: on the tarmac, in the air, and even while fleeing North Korean groundskeeper cells. Otherwise, plenty of rest and fluids made his world go round, granting the energy and mental acuity to tackle each day’s tasks, like diversifying his retirement holdings. […]
Even if I did not dare invite anyone, I still wanted a party—the fountain downtown to change times, a saxophone to start noodling out of nowhere as I crossed the street past mine or simply a friend to sit me down at the table of pressed-tin under the striped awnings where chestnut trees […]
She was three, maybe four years old, ages away from maps and schedules, timers set to govern how late or lost she’d become, how partially found among hours that went by dark and undiscovered. However, her touch mechanism was already fully formed, activated at birth—the rest of her life would be fine tuning the […]
Through autumn leaves that lift and drop like birdless wings, perpetually rearranging the Public Garden, my daughter cartwheels and sings. Tourists and policemen on horses tap their feet, clap, toss coins that tumble through the brisk air like brass and copper buttons popping off a worn coat. The attention makes her sing louder. […]
Acting on the belief that anachronisms are talismen, he rode Helvetie’s old elevator (3 people max) up and down at least three times Once he got off on the wrong floor Another time he got off to ask the night porter to uncork a local bottle (bought down the street at Mosca Vins) […]
Take myself. To know coeur. As us. Tonight. The thorn of to have— What was done before the knife’s plunge. Without breaking the I am for you. That is no pain. Before the sting of flesh, imagine— To be played in the round. Plosion into fragile am, nor along the slightest edge: forsake our collaring […]
Grandma didn’t always hang with a football team, sometimes she played hockey or ice-skated with Chinese waiters. It was rumored she went skating on a date twenty years after her husband died. She was a tall, peculiar bride to Louis who strolled near Orthodox Jews who came to her house to perform miracles. […]
So many substitutions in this story: stepmother for mother, brother for father, morsels of muffin for little white stones, and once the oven is hot, witch for boy, and in earlier locations, Gretel for pearl, girl for teeth, take my thumbs for chicken bones, grandma, take my babies for wolf meat. I’d give […]
In the dusk of cool November that signals the winter to come, two boys and their mama stand at the tracks and ponder the ghost of a train. The younger brother catches a sudden chill, but instead of pressing up to one of the other two for warmth, he stands there, teeth chattering a little. […]
Begin with the equation: wood = bone. If bone, a rib splintered, branch in fragments. Fabricate from these pieces, the parts for a miniature ship —delicately assemble her through the narrow neck of an oblong bottle (if glass, then skin) to be corked and kept. From bone, bone; skin, skin. This is the beginning, […]
We made fun of him when he was young and we made fun of him when he was old It’s because he was so beautiful when he was young interestingly enough, beautiful when he was old, too I am not talking about an inanimate object. For example, this candlestick here. The wick […]
It was that minute in the elevator, that moment when we careened through floors with only a gap of words between us. It was then that I knew the way we watched each other would have to end. It would have to be untangled, like a skein, a section at a time until we could […]
You decide to walk home from work. Make it a habit. Maybe a good habit will replace a bad habit. Karma. Karma. Karma. Why do people enjoy warning everyone about karma? Attribute everything to karma. Perhaps it’s better than blaming everything on god. What is feng shui? Maybe that’ll replace karma. Maybe Asian traditions will […]
The Soft Hearted Girl Momoko has turned into a giant crab balancing the world on her back. The world, in turn, has shrunk to an ellipse the size of a fish bowl. Behind the glass are people as islands who once pretended they were important as continents. “Don’t drop us,” screams a girl, scrunched-face and […]
Hours before the spaceship burst from the mountain, the four of us broke camp in snow just below tree line. Right away I fell behind, panting, leaning into the slope and a wind so warm you’d think it had cooked all night in Shasta’s summit crater before streaming down on us.
Rick Moody is a counterculture writer who once got to throw a pie in the face of his biggest critic. A New York City native, Rick Moody studied under Angela Carter and John Hawkes at Brown University and received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University in 1986. His first novel, Garden State, […]
Social justice infuses nearly all my fiction, whether directly or indirectly, and I cannot imagine what shape my stories would take if they did not in some manner address this. Issues concerning social justice are most often what first move me to put pen to paper, even if the threads of the injustice are woven into a seemingly unrelated arc.
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