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. […]
Poets are just whisperers, whispering the rose verse, Weaving words as a curse. They wander the groves In order to find doves. They wander the meadows, So they find adagios. They wander the streams, To find the crowns of queens. Poets are just whisperers, Who their lament makes ornate.[…]
I draw from my experience within this toxic culture and provide a call to action for the women who don’t have a voice to feel empowered and for the men with a little too much to say to be softened. The imagery I use within my work references the everyday accessible household items that are traditionally associated with my Mexican-American household[…]
We drive back behind a sluggish logging truck. The nodule in my neck is bigger this year, crowding my windpipe. The truck takes every turn with us, like it knows where we live. Maybe we could get you some scarves, you say […]
your island, before storms and faces crashed on your shores with new names for death and stolen lands, whips and dark nights, histories of ancestors piled in the hulls of ships[…]
Jackie Miller danced around her kitchen when she learned she landed a temporary-to-permanent position at Finch Life & Casualty. It had been years since she held down a regular nine-to-five. Her duties entailed answering the ten-line phone system, greeting guests, and opening the mail […]
While I know all of these people deeply, I was most interested in my ability to render them anonymous to both myself and my audience. This led to an array of floating heads that, like anonymous online spaces, capture—and then distort[…]
The things that tend to happen in some of the worst situations elsewhere, also do occur here, even though Americans pretend they do not. It is, in some ways, what Deaf Republic is about.[…]
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.[…]
Simian Immunodeficiency Virus adapted to live in the body of a person, and then the window was pried
open: open to spread through the villages of Cameroon, and then the rest of Africa, and then the world
beyond, until it found its way to a club in the suburbs of New Orleans and into the lifeblood of the man
who lived next door, my uncle.[…]
I take solace in knowing how to make my father’s chicken adobo, because when he died in 2017, it was one of the many dishes he had made for us that wasn’t lost to us forever with his sudden passing[…]
The auction block still rides on the black backs of ghosts hurling themselves town to town […]
The most important piece of advice I got from my first mentor was to get as broad of an education as possible without diluting it.[…]
Since Paati died, fireworks were the only thing that could get Thatha up and out of bed, and the goggles were the only thing that let Amma let us keep watching the shows.[…]
In works like, The Hands of Time, I convey the delicate nature balance between life and death. In life, death is constantly brushing our fingertips. And yet, in death, our connection to life makes it so that we never truly die.[…]
Today’s human beings feel comfortable with their non-historical past, but during an ideological process and in deep connection with social events, the nature of these dreams changes and they are abstract.[…]
Aditi Khorana grew up in India, Denmark, and New England, and has worked as a journalist for ABC News, CNN, and PBS, and also as a marketing consultant for Fox, Paramount, and Sony. All of this life experience adds up to a unique, empowering, fierce body of work, including two novels, Mirror in the Sky and Library of Fates […]
The chapped lips of last season’s flora, the winter-cracked cattails slowly recovering their limber. Today I saw a willow precisely […]
But I couldn’t put her away. I was mourning. And I needed to mourn. That’s healthy.[…]
Well, it looks as though you have three choices. You can go to him as he orders; you can refuse,
be whipped, and then have him take you by force; or you can run away again.[…]
Those calls have been fewer and farther between these last few weeks. I suspect you’ve got to realize that, but if I’m honest, I’ve stopped wondering who it is you’re fighting during your backroom breaks at Best Buy instead of reapplying to your undergraduate program. […]
During childhood I heard the stories about the shtetls and the pogroms that escalated to become the
Holocaust where 6 million Jews—two thirds of the Jewish population in Europe— were killed for no other
reason than for being Jewish.[…]
I crouch before the fermentation cabinet every other morning to check on my scoby, the color of my kraut, to smell the bacterial funk, and each time I am transported.[…]
These older Mexican ladies can feel like their childhoods were important. Their childhoods had beauty; their childhoods are worthy of literature.[…]
Like frightened birds after a hunter’s shot—My dreams scatter in flight when I open up my eyes[…]
I have found ways to navigate sex—and trauma—anew. The following series explores the pain of sexual violence as well as the rediscovery of my body.[…]
They grin—a subtle, instinctive apology offered on a crooked row of short, fat teeth screaming for braces and fluoride. Held out on a silver tray, the smile is meant to flatten the offense they don’t yet recognize. They’re too young and they don’t understand taxes or sex or the government or the reason they’re the ones chosen for the roles of Mary and Joseph in the Christmas play every year, but something about this feels right for them.[…]
A literary and art journal
from the MFA community at
Antioch University Los Angeles.
Credit: Julian Parker-Burns
Credit: Paige DePratter
Credit: Jobi Adams
Credit: Elizabeth Pellette
Credit: Rebecca Aranda
Credit Vladimir Levashov
Michael Milberger
Credit: Luke Peterson