Summer-Fall 2025 Issue 27
Hunger might be the word for it. Maybe hunger made me pop open sticky drawers in the kitchen and poke my head into cupboards nearly glued shut by the dust of time. Hunger, maybe, is why I searched those empty places again and again as a child, though I knew full well there were only ever mouse droppings rolling on the wood, and two dried end pieces of bread, hard as tree bark, in the long drawer beneath the toaster.
You left my floor littered with beautiful ideas.
No way to pick them up,
no way to erase the impure line
left by thinking on the floor.
The state of the world breaks my heart every day. Broken hearted, I stay online. I can’t log off. Because my career and schooling are all done remotely, I tend to struggle with boundaries regarding screen time, with knowing when to break away.
Like many of you, I have been spilling my guts online to the world because the guts of the world keep spilling. None of it is pretty. But it’s one of the things that, having searched for basically my entire life, I found that tempers the chaos that lives rent free inside my head.
you pull out the orange body
holding it by its head-
scarf in fine green lace
you peel it in flaming ribbons
blazing the downward spiral
In the autopsy of my life
they will pry open my chest
and from there will surface
a fist
clenched tightly
Sitting in the sun,
sipping instant coffee,
I hear 鞭炮 behind me.
I’ve gotten used to it—especially this time of year—
but still decide to turn and look:
Remnant streams of smoke near mountaintops
Fourteen years in the system
is no fun. Said Good-bye to Comstock.
Didn’t look back. Rode the bus
to Port Authority. Walked the Deuce
to Time Square. Took the D train
to Coney. Ate Mama’s home cooked
Xiomara Blumenkron clocked in at 7:52 AM and was at her desk by 7:58 AM. She decided against the usual Friday morning treat, ruefully passing her favorite drive-in coffee shop, in order to make it in time for the meeting.
“A quien madruga, Dios lo ayuda,” her mother said when Xiomara was a small girl, yawning and rubbing her eyes, when she was taken along for jobs. One who rises early is helped by God was her mother’s motto as she went house to identical house in the suburbs, looking after
What you wanted to leave me was metaphor. What you left
was a black-and-white notebook from the commissary
that might contain the mystery of you: your bent words soaked
in remnants your body heaved up for two weeks in solitary
while you were dope sick. I’ve been airing you out
for days now, though Brother, my fingers bear the rigid
She put up with a lot, by her lights, grudgingly going to the doctor after she’d dropped thirty pounds in two months. She took home the pamphlets: Diabetes and You, Dr. Anselm’s Program for Diabetics, The Diabetic Gourmet. She learned how to stick her finger with a needle and to stab insulin into her thigh, and she kept to herself how she hated it. She cooked the same dinners for Dad and for us when we came on Sundays. If she had a bite of dessert, she learned to compensate for it
The girl was easy to miss, a nondescript point on the road, as common as a rotted wooden fence leant against a patch of high grass. And he would have missed her if it were not for the pitch black of her hair fluffing up in the sun, like a crow lazing through the thick summer air. Her slender tan arm perpendicular to her body, a thumb encouraging a driver to notice her. He pulled to a stop a few feet ahead and she ran up with a sweet prance. In his rearview he could see she was wearing those flat shoes that sling around women’s feet like small nests.
The trees should have withered months ago, but everything is too green. I walk the dog past a magnolia on our morning route and find one last leaf still attached to its branch. I tell the dog to growl at it, as if she can intimidate the leaf into a timely death. As if this can fix an eighty-degree day in November, or last week’s brushfire in the middle of Prospect Park. The dog pisses on a mess of roots and blinks past me with whale eyes. I follow her gaze to the branches and see them: buds. Magnolia buds. Creamy white and six months early, premature mouths gulping the air.
We pulled the night back—
eyes rolled over white, parched
from darkness. This sudden, shredded
flesh, like a flash of green light.
We witnessed almost every possible
thing that wasn’t meant to be seen:
anarchy symbols spray painted
on the broken corpses of angels,
sleep-drunk cows taking dream steps,
the pulsing alarm clock of insect wings.
It’s midnight, and we’re kicking gravel in the neighborhood.
Next to me, he’s caught in a rhythm: head bobbing, fingers drumming, feet tapping to the bone-deep thrum of nearby rager music. An empty McDonald’s bag skitters across the road, dances with us before the wind whisks it past a row of parked cars.
Above us, the sky unfurls like a movie poster.
Everything is white; the snow coming down in sticky, territorial clumps, smothering the massive houses, the yards, this ritzy neighborhood road, and the whole damn tri-state area. I steer Angela, my complaining old maid of a black sedan, through the wet thickness and toward this last-minute job I agreed to. The cleaning company called when I was barely awake—and still a little drunk. Partying on a weeknight is never my best idea. But with the community college closed and all my classes cancelled today, even in my groggy state, making money seemed like a sound option. Until I hit these messy roads. Hardly anyone is out, and for good reason.
Once there was a door that opened to you, and your grandmother stood behind it. Loud voices and warm light spilled messily from behind her while you and your sister shivered in the jagged Chicago cold. Overjoyed to see you on her worn front stoop, returned from the inhospitable East Coast, she ushered you in. In her excitement, she slammed the door in your parents’ faces, shouting, “The girls are here!” Your grandfather ambled down threadbare carpeted stairs that had weathered six pounding sets of his children’s feet. Smelling of cigarette smoke, peering through
3.5 inches– The distance
between brake and accelerator–
safety and rupture –
is a slender perch on which to wobble
ankle flexed, not even a thrum
between Sirius XM music
Leth forgot the apocalypse again today.
When I come down, he’s already shuffling through the cupboards, looking for the coffee. I tell him we’re out. Never mind that it’s been forty years since either of us has had a cup. I offer to make tea, but he just laughs and says he’s not that desperate; he’ll stop on his way to work.
He likes the chicory tea. He used to hike out to the Goddard’s farm for it special.
We survived the fires and the smoke. We survived the coup. The plague in ’56 and again
There was a hot dog stand
up the highway, Route 6,
that brought us happiness.
It didn’t take much at that age—
strong mustard. We took a break
painting our rental in the woods,
a starter home that stood below the
landlord’s A-frame like a dog awaiting
My baby eats a tiny bolus of rice at a time. She opens her mouth. An ‘O’ or an ‘AA,’ for me to place the rice on her soft round tongue, which looks like a slice of ham. I place the bolus, flavoured with a smidgeon of ghee and salt in the centre. She closes her mouth along with her eyes. When she opens them again, I put on my reading glasses, and lean towards her. Her baby breath tickles my nose. I begin to read.
I try to stop myself, but I can’t resist checking my phone again. It’s summer, and I haven’t seen anyone in days. I’ve liked a hundred posts, and no one even cares if I’m alive?
Nothing. I set the phone down, then it dings, as if rewarding me for giving up hope. It’s a message from Jill. I haven’t seen her in weeks.
Did you hear what happened?
No?
A kid got shot by cops. A Black teenager. Everyone is going downtown to protest. Want to come? We can pick you up.
I think for a minute, thumbs paused. I don’t like crowds. I don’t like going into the city. And anyway, Dad will say no.
Live in a small apartment above a bakery and wake
to the buxom smell of yeasted dough, browned butter,
and sugar seeped from scones. Imagine the baker and barista
humming along to their opening shift playlist. Get that coffee
and scone, but not to go. When you go to work, go as a mailman.
Yes, a mailman, because you want to know how a man feels.
The scent of my childhood is irises and dogshit. Metallic like wire and blood from splinters. A dry dust that coats the nostrils, leaves tissue black.
The childhood of my friends smells different. Sweet like candy and attentive parents. I notice their fences are just for animals like pigs and horses, and I wonder if they can smell the fear in me.
Jenny’s mom thinks I’m too polite and therefore insincere. I worry they can smell the
Sugar sits by the window, clutching the blanket, staring into the sky again. She’s barely moved since he took her baby. Sugar used to be sweet—annoyingly cheery, really—so much so, we’d roll our eyes at her, while secretly wishing we could share her lust for life. But now, she’s silent. Like nothing’s left but the empty carcass of the mother she’ll never get to be. Or at least she thinks she’ll never be. Her life will change, if tonight goes well. We didn’t tell Sugar the plan since she’s useless right now. She doesn’t know we’re gonna kill Troy.
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Photo credit: Diana Lixenberg