He couldn’t cut straight. Hell, he couldn’t even fold the damned paper properly. He even managed to get glue all over his glasses, which resembled boogers streaking across both lenses. While I was annoyed with him, I was even more jealous. I wanted a dad too.[…]
Thanks for posting me. At least you know someone (probably) read the headline. Maybe they even read the first few lines of text that appear beneath the thumbnail image, or the pull quotes. […]
It hit 120℉—122℉ in fact—a few weeks ago in my desert town. The days before and after weren’t much better: 116℉, and then 119℉, respectively. While these types are unheard of, we don’t typically see them until the dead of August for a couple of days.
We live in a world that strives to consume the entirety of our time and attention. Work, play, social media, and the 24/7 news cycle cry out for our attention at all hours of the day and night. Our ability to seek refuge in a place where all that can be ignored, turned off, and tuned out is vital to our very self-preservation.[…]
Small circles of blood blossom. The water turns pink. With a quick breath she is all girl again, using her hands to feel the bottom of the tub. It is filled with shattered glass and her legs are bleeding. […]
Looking down at the little lump of ashes in the crease of the sports page, I wet my finger in my mouth, touched it to the ashes and put it on my tongue.[…]
In terms of isolation, I try to counteract that by building community, which I’ve done from the beginning, and by collaborating pretty heavily on a lot of projects.[…]
The personas we apply to the occupations that we take for granted everyday are inseparable from the job itself because of our own indolence towards learning anything different. This series pairs the two perspectives that represent how Latinos are traditionally characterized[…]
The guns sing a carmine joy incarnate—note how, here, two figures of speech live in peaceful coexistence to narrate an epic event.[…]
As anyone who has ever heard a black comic perform or listened to a rap song knows, we don’t do
humblebragging. When you are the bomb, you simply say so.[…]
Panama, on this street and in this time we’re missing, Before my days and nights (And from this poem) oscillating like water between lilies, With its fortified walls and buildings[…]
So, if I feel so alienated from gender, why should it be such a determining factor in who I would like? I can’t imagine making any woman who likes men happy. Wouldn’t we all be better off just liking everyone?[…]
Six filaments from my clenched fist end up in the wastebasket. The tease and tug are pushing obsession buttons. I react to phantom touches, swipe, and come away with nothing. Repeat.[…]
not subtlety, and at sundown begin moaning. The veterinarians act more veterinarianly. It must be internal damage. It must be the liver rupturing. Yes, the liver. And that is how these prognoses tend. Diagnosis being […]
No one ever tells you, “Dying can be pretty hideous.” I don’t know if it’s because that sort of fear of dying oneself, you know? If you think too much about it, it can be scary. I think about it all the time, but that’s because I’ve lived it, and it was around me all the time.[…]
Between the slurred lisp of her words, Daisy’s mother starts to whisper to her about dead girls. It starts off as a trickle of information, gossipy fascination over the feral, invited by a story on the news or something that her mother heard on the radio while driving […]
Flying for business, I was sitting in a window seat with earbuds and a book when a young woman next to me reclined her seat. Leaning back to get comfortable, she placed her ankle over mine and proceeded to fall asleep […]
I had only seen them once. They’d probably escaped from a botanical garden or perhaps that tree had just been a stop on a journey circumnavigating countries, maybe even continents. […]
Within this project I have conveyed this through the color, lighting, clarity, and positioning in the images. These images are meant to have meaning, as well as have thoughts projected upon them by the viewer not dependent upon words or timeframe.[…]
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?[…]
Now she can’t do anything anymore, so, when I visit her, I tell her to prepare the salad, just to kill time. She peels away the bad leaves, and I tell her, “Throw them away and leave the good ones.” She starts, but then she forgets, so we eat the rotten salad and we mix it with curcuma and balsamic vinaigrette to cover the bad taste.[…]
There’s this belief that if you apply enough technique in all these different ways, that you will end up with a novel. Technique is not everything. There’s a lot to recommend it, but the spark of life is something that the reader feels through the writer, and the writer has to feel it first.[…]
You get to re-live childhood again if you have children, a kind of a do-over, the opportunity to
create the kind of childhood you had and loved, or, even more seductive, the chance to create
the childhood you never had and missed your whole life.[…]
Jouma nodded calmly, then got to his feet, excused himself and left the tent, his sons and entourage following in his steps. Today was the wedding of one of his sons, and the festivities could be heard from afar.[…]
And when the night draws its celebrations to a close, the hares undress all alone, sexes smeared from long storms. Perhaps we’ve forgotten that the body, yes the body, finds a desolate kind of beauty once exposed […]
Genevieve Hudson is, both, grounded and a force of nature. She is wise beyond her years, genuine, insightful, and fierce, with a hint of ineffable magic. This special alchemy infuses her teaching, enabling her to engage students on a technical and emotional level simultaneously, meeting everyone exactly where they are while encouraging expansion and elevation […]
My feelings didn’t shift, but my body did. I knelt beside you on our bed and brought your head to my shoulder. I repeated her message. But you already knew. You had seen my face change.[…]
When he relays the story over the phone, he doesn’t repeat what they said to him, but I know enough to know they could also be applied to me, to my family, to my best friends, could be said to any Asian on the street who is or is not Chinese, who does or does not wear a face mask. […]
A literary and art journal
from the MFA community at
Antioch University Los Angeles.
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Credit: Furery Reid Spelman College staff photographer
Credit: Nancy Falk
Credit: Emily Tarnawa
Credit: Laura Falsetti
Amber Estes Thieneman