[fiction] One morning, there are people in her house. Caren lives alone. She never married and her last long-term thing ended five years ago. She’s fine. She likes it: those early hours sipping coffee, her cat, Guster, winding through her bare legs. She can wear her rattiest t-shirts, hum off-key while getting ready. But now […]
I was first introduced to Issac Bailey at the Chicago Tribune Printers Row Lit Fest last June, where he spoke about his book My Brother Moochie: Regaining Dignity in the Face of Crime, Poverty, and Racism in the American South. My Brother Moochie is a powerful, personal exploration of race and racism and of the […]
1. Despite my protests, neither my mother nor my father will concede the point. I was not, according to them, in my right mind when I called from a hospital bed at Ajou University Hospital. They detected something. An aberrance. Like an incoherence of speech, or a delirious register of voice. It’s only natural they […]
[translated poetry] Before Spring A strange sound wakes you. Your heart? Your stomach? Just the pipes. Two-thirty in the morning. A pale lane of light pollution looms between the high rises on the horizon. Above it, a thin strip of sky. Like clumps of minerals in a newly discovered mining cavity, dim stars shine. The […]
The hospital walls were stark white and we weren’t allowed to have pens: they were on the list of things we could potentially hurt ourselves with, alongside other items like shoelaces and earrings. I was thirteen and doodling with Crayola markers on construction paper. Even with the “non-toxic” declaration written on its label in the […]
[translated flash prose] Take this seed. Plant it in an olla that has only been used to make coffee. Water it lightly Tuesdays and Fridays around midnight. It will grow into a plant with black flowers. Cut them with a man’s knife and grind them up in a new lava stone mortar. You will be […]
In the middle of an IKEA showroom, I agonized over the transition between two sentences. I was wrestling with a second-grade assignment on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. While I knew any seven-year-old could cobble together two statements about Dr. King, bridging together two thoughts about his achievements with one seamless transition proved to be […]
[creative nonfiction] So damned sick of delicate things. My co-worker who was raped over and over. I want to time travel, tell his five-year-old self, Punch your father’s friend in the face the next time he touches you. Don’t say resilience. Children are breakable. I’m tired of my toe poking through the sock printed with […]
“Your mother’s your slave,” a girl in the playground taunted. “Is not!” I insisted, but even at six years old, I recognized the truth in her words. My mom pulled socks on my feet while I lay in bed to save me from the shock of cold tile, read to me in the bathroom when […]
[fiction] Austin orders an entire seafood boil for himself. He ignores the crawfish and halved cobs of corn, focusing instead on the crab legs, which he cracks open with such force the buttery juices mist Jorge’s face. Jorge’s plate is nearly empty now. He had devoured his crispy-fried cod sandwich in five minutes and spends […]
[translated fiction] Dime-a-dozen, fair-weather friends—the ones you met to do nothing but sit around, drink beer, and gab. The night we hung out was of the same kind. On one side of the booth sat men who wanted a one night stand. None of the ladies on the other side were seeking Mr. Right, either. […]
Young writers are finding ways to speak out through character. Pulled from the news, fiction and fact condense into compelling personal accounts. But Naima Coster isn’t politicizing a message. Her work is far more reaching, more tender, and more carefully wrought. This Yale, Columbia, and Fordham graduate draws the straight line of success from classwork […]
Josef didn’t realize how little I thought about religion—how complete my lack of belief. “Are you religious?” I asked on one of our New York subway trips. I wonder now why I asked. I didn’t have the slightest premonition. I was making a joke, teasing, the way I might have said, “So, are you secretly […]
Becca drops her announcement into the conversation casually. “So… I met someone and it’s looking pretty serious so far.” She is sitting at a long table in the party room of the Hasidic shteeble near her childhood home, the small synagogue that her parents, creatures of habit that they are, still attend. Her father prays […]
Christopher Castellani, the son of Italian-American immigrants, is best known for his critically-acclaimed trilogy of novels about an Italian-American family: A Kiss from Maddalena (Algonquin Books, 2003), The Saint of Lost Things (Algonquin, 2005), and All This Talk of Love (Algonquin, 2013). Filled with real and complex characters living in turbulent times, the Grasso family’s story reminded me of my […]
[fiction] I awoke from an exquisite dream. That pissed me off right there, cause in my dream, I was being devoured by love. When I flip the switch, a billion fucking cockroaches scatter. Naturally, I go batshit crazy, careening around the room, stomping and cursing. Now the neighbors are up. “Hey, cut that shit out!” […]
Natashia Deón is the acclaimed author of Grace (Counterpoint Press, 2016), a Kirkus Review Best Book of 2016, a New York Times Top Book 2016, an Entropy Magazine Best Book of 2016, and winner of the American Library Association Black Caucus 2017 First Novel Prize, among other honors. Deón is a graduate of the University […]
It was a cloudy September morning in San Francisco and my body had decided that everything inside of it was poison. It was 8:34 a.m. on a Thursday and I was hungover at work, sitting behind my desk praying that my breath smelled like coffee and not vomit. It wasn’t very often that I was […]
[translated poetry] What do we know? Who then understands the depths of things? The sunset glowed in the rose-hued clouds. It was the end of a day of storms, and the west Set the showers aflame in a ferocious blaze. Near a ditch, at the edge of a rain puddle, A toad looked at the […]
The February I am twenty-six, on the day before I’m supposed to fly to Portland to rent a house, I come down with the most brutal and short-lived flu I’ve ever had. My body aches so badly, I can’t move. When I say this, I don’t just mean that it hurts to move—I worry, when […]
[creative nonfiction] The first one was in the egg shop. I was a baby, strapped to my mother’s back in a blue nylon carrier while she wandered Kotwali bazaar. Shelves of eggs, a single room with three walls and a pull-over aluminum door. All of the eggs broke. After the shaking stopped, the street dogs […]
I take a breath and hold it before putting my key in the lock. It’s four o’clock on a Thursday, which means Mom is on her way home from work at Boutique Aspirations. It sounds nice. Imagine a boutique selling hopes and dreams, but the boutique is a vacuum-repair shop. Her job literally sucks. Aspirateur […]
The Shekhinah Some say the Shekhinah is the queen of presence, pulsing upward through the living earth, bidding us to bloom in our skins. The apple orchard in full blossom. But when you see me, I am a burning flame, blonde hair billowing behind. You have no throne festooned with ribbons, no needle to embroider my […]
As you stare at the photo hanging above the fireplace, you are acutely aware of your wife in the other room, folding laundry. You wonder if she can sense this shift in your life, triggered by what just arrived for you in the mail. Though you’ve never seen her handwriting in English, as soon as […]
The children pick the peeling yellow paint from the bathroom pipes and lick it while Mama is gabbing on the phone with her sister. Papa returns from work at four and takes the yellow plastic strap out of the second dresser drawer and whips their thighs since Mama has delegated punishment for their transgressions during […]
[creative nonfiction] She is sitting in an arm chair next to a broad window that overlooks Fairbanks Avenue and Lake Michigan. She ignores me as I walk from the doorway, across her hospital room, then perch on the broad windowsill. I welcome the cold of metal as the sensation seeps through my white coat, then […]
Turkish Coffee Mama tilts the cup to the side, rolls it around, examines each line, dot, drop. They look like black, crusty Jackson Pollock paintings. She doesn’t take it too seriously. “Ah, habibti, it’s a man in a hat. You’ll meet him soon, and he will be very important to you,” she says to my […]
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