She wishes she could beat the dust mites out of the rug of this world. But she’s a woman, and her body is the inherited fabric men wipe their boots on, woven and patched by generations of furious women. Her hands are an ancestral tree, she names each branch of herself on her fingers: wife, […]
My college decision was a compromise of impulses. These were my most important criteria: not close to home (so I would grow more and have more independence); located in or in immediate proximity of a large city (where there’d be a decent amount of Black people who existed who were not me); top-notch academics (since my mind deserved a challenge and I’m a competitive person deep down); prestige (translation: respect). My father didn’t really care what I did, but not in a lazy way we expect of men—he just trusted I was already thinking of the right things, as he’d always done. My mother was all about practicality: “make sure you can go out there and get a job when you graduate.”
Souvenir is one of the first French words I learned in childhood, before taking any language lessons at school. I was enamored with its luxurious vowels, its music. I learned the Arabic-accented pronunciation of it from my mother and her friends, women of the Levant, as the French would designate their homelands, living in Saudi […]
Most mornings I deliver my child into the arms of strangers who will lead him through passages papered in apples and rainbows, pencils and stars, each holding a single name, the names’ owners a crush shouting cascades of syllables, furious energy heating the room, swallowing my joyful son. Not safe to play outside today —shadows […]
[fiction] Walking into rehearsal that day, I felt awkward and out of place. I sat at my little producer’s desk in a quiet corner of the drama room. I tried to scan the space from under the cover of my bangs, while pretending to read texts. The room looked like other classrooms—beige linoleum floors, once-white […]
I found LA based writer Siel Ju’s novel Cake Time: a novel-in-stories during a trip to LA in December 2017, and I was hooked. I easily fell into the rhythm of the book’s structure and style, and Siel’s use of language: witty and sharp. The next logical step for me, of course, was to use […]
[translated poetry] LONELY POET, QUIET RESTAURANT Words in the head, restaurant nearby Clouds have amassed in the month of Asharh reminding of Distressed days—streets are bumpy all over. Who knows when they’ll be cleared of mud-heaps! In these hours he has to find a way out. Poetry and coffee are waiting for him. Suddenly rain starts, […]
Once again, here I am with a bursting bladder and a fried brain, frozen between two doors.
They mounted it overnight, cemented the rule so that there’d be no mistaking my high school for a safe space. The engraved letters of the white-and-gray sign, so new that it hasn’t even been vandalized yet, scream at me from above the bathroom door: Girls ONLY.
Three minutes before the mudslide, I sit in the gardenshed of you— woodrot, pardoned given to the carpenter ants. I peel at plywood, name my body a townhouse built to be the walls of someone else. One minute after the mudslide, I am asked to qualify what happened give it a name: this […]
Picture the big windy-soft midcentury rain rinsing the windows of the San Fran hospital where it’s the goofy John Cage’s job this afternoon to babysit a roomful of kids whose parents just doors down are dying, so silently with his spindle arms he mimes first a fast breaststroke against the window’s water then, even better, […]
[fiction] After Dad left, Mom stayed up late at the kitchen table with a bottle of red wine, staining her teeth purple and chewing the edges of her nails. She did this for about three months. Then one day I came home after my last class—geography, I was in the sixth grade—and found her at […]
Tony Lewis, Jr is a husband, father, son, author and activist. He works diligently, fighting for the rights of incarcerated men and women who have left family behind. But most importantly, he is fighting for the DCPS school system to offer aid to children who have an incarcerated parent. He also uses his voice to […]
I That spring I counted hydrogen ions, followed waste through porous membranes into silent bio-soups, waited for the nucleus to wake. It was late in the last century: pale blue moons and sugar cereals, Baghdad statues coming down, anti-aircraft tracers loverly in the amniotic night. II Can you guess where I’m calling from? The county […]
[self-translated fiction] Sitting on the wooden boat, Farid shook from the cold. It was night. The moon shone like a pearl on the smooth surface of the Mediterranean Sea. It was dark, dark like the smoke of fires, tragic like the body of his father, dark like the cave where Farid, who was only eight […]
“look, we don’t know each other, but we don’t have to—” just give me your careless, normal hunger— i know we saw each other on that gay app we won’t ever mention out loud irl— i’ve served you the coffee breath that lives, sometimes, in another man’s mouth— you’ve seen me bloodshot and rude— maybe […]
I never think of my uncle as a man with rabid mouths burgeoning inside his skull. I’ve never seen him draw his teeth like burning hatchets or pull dead wolves out of his head. I’ve heard the stories; man leaves the hospital door ajar & wakes up peeling mothwings off a hospital floor. Man removes […]
[translated poetry] Chinese Fable When I was small my father’s coworker ran off coming back with one of those briefcases full of money close, smutty talk filled our town about what he’d done to get it he smiled and disappeared again Next we heard he’d been sentenced to death for drug trafficking a family member […]
“The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and […]
[translated poetry] I Given in measurement. Play seasons. Beneath bushes of fog, face blades, get knotty, all the while be back, pelvis, exchange of oxygen and photosynthesis. Lust as shears. Slight air supply, then: Breathe, raise arms shoulder-high, a beelined shoot axis. Put up defense with leaves (thorns, bugs, spiderwebs), evaporation of the slightest. The […]
Every year when my breast is squeezed into the machine and the woman behind the Plexiglas tells me not to move, when the radiologist reads the film and says, “You’re high risk,” I’m forced to think of Barbara, my maternal aunt, who found a lump at fifty-six, the age I am now. My mammogram happens […]
[translated poetry] He was the same as other people who know nothing about the white gray glass: about the flat drop of sameness in a frame of white-lacquered window like a gray block of longing lying in a day rectangle of colored dough of encounters. He has installed the window panes in a […]
My daughter’s hand was gone. It took me only moments to slide coins across a counter on Santa Cruz’s boardwalk. When I dropped my hand back, hers was missing. In my left hand, I found the familiar grip of her five-year-old brother, Austin. As I used my chin to snap my wallet, I groped around […]
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