Listen. . . On a velvety night in a desert land, a cool wind moved among dunes and glided into a small village. The curious wind lifted the long limbs of the date palm trees, touched the donkey’s fur in the stable, and poked through the open window of Ayesha’s room in her family’s house. […]
Up at five. I rise before she does. I begin cleaning by six. It takes seven hours. It never ceases to humiliate: cleaning another woman’s home. Take a break to wake Mrs. Pattershall, serve her tea, and provide a hand to help her out of bed. After dressing, she gets under my feet. I think […]
“Project Hippolytus” is inspired by a Greek myth: Asclepius, the patron of medicine, raises the boy Hippolytus from the dead. Zeus is angered by this, and he strikes Asclepius down with a thunder bolt. Our century seems to think…
Jillian Lauren was born in New Jersey and found herself working in theater in New York by her late teens. Her work in theater led to a career in sex work, which became the subject of her memoir Some Girls, covering the time Lauren spent in the harem of Prince Jefri Bolkiah, youngest brother of the sultan of Brunei…
I first knew Diana Woods as a fiction student in the Antioch MFA program. Though I primarily teach creative nonfiction, she was assigned to my workshop two years ago during a genre jump into creative nonfiction. She was just recovering from a round a chemo then and came to class with a different, brightly colored […]
When I grabbed at her hand to keep her from going again, a tiny tip of her pointer finger came off. I clasped it tightly as she ran in velvet high heels down 42nd Street, almost tripping over her hair. It was still warm against my palm…
MY FIRST TIME. Wouldn’t it be great if I remembered the first bribe I ever gave? I’d love to shine a light on its romantic aspect, the shameful complicity between the briber and the bribed, the shy smiles exchanged. Maybe I’d write something like, It was a first kiss: loss of innocence paired with the […]
Aimee Bender is the author of two short story collections, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) and Willful Creatures (2005), two novels, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010) and a novella, The Third Elevator (2009). She contributed to The Secret Society of Demolition Writers and […]
When Grandmother Gasse passed, Art got access to the trust account. The very next morning, he quit the radio station by calling his boss and suggesting he shove it. Dropping the phone, he tossed his head back, flung his arms high, and howled. The boy would devote himself to painting, hereafter, as he had dreamt […]
On the same road, there lived a girl with feathers for hair and a boy poet who had to use a wheelchair. The boy lived in a small rented house, and he’d always had to use a wheelchair. But the girl, she lived in the large stripe-painted house…
We’ve just come through a contentious election, and regardless of your pick on election day, the election process asked people to examine their beliefs and make choices accordingly. Our lives are full of choices from the second we get up in the morning and have to decide what to wear until the minute we decide […]
Greg Neri writes poetry, prose, and graphic novels for young adults under the pen name G. Neri. He’s said, “I write provocative, edgy stories for reluctant readers, especially urban boys, in hopes that these kinds of books—immediate, compelling and told through the eyes of young males—will open minds to reading.” They’re not the only ones taking note […]
My shadow seemed down when I was boxing it the other day. I’m not sure if that was the first time or what, I never paid much attention to my shadow unless we were boxing, and we only boxed when I was pissed so I probably wouldn’t have noticed even if it was. But this […]
Grandmother’s house nestled at the edge of a wild wood. In the summer, my parents left me with her while they traveled north for my father’s job. He worked part-time for logging companies, clear-cutting forests, harvesting pulp and timber near Grand Marais and Stonington in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Those were summers of tanned bare legs […]
What housewarming gift is best for someone moving into a townhouse that will be under scaffolding and tarps for a year? I hope to get Evelyn Lau’s Living under Plastic. She writes poetry inside quiet places…
Arthur Sze was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2012. He was born in New York City and educated at the University of California, Berkeley. Sze is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Ginkgo Light (2009), Quipu (2005), The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (1998), and Archipelago (1995). He is […]
This never means the same thing twice. Tonight our children sleep in the backseat. Their heads yield left and right through the country, the moon a cantaloupe slice crowding Cygnus from the sky. Under that pinoak I crept, kissed a boy in porchlight pallor, picked grass from between my toes. By the juniper I snuck […]
I. Twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays, I saw them. Oiled, buttered up, ready for consumption. And though black writers hate to describe skin color in terms of food, it’s true: their bodies were all the shades of brown you’d see on a Thanksgiving dinner table. That’s not the important thing. This is. Heads […]
Monday My fingertips hurt again. The quad is too noisy to be distracting; a chaos of first trimester stress. No internet for the loop of email, Hulu, Twitter. No service for texts from Mom. Just me and the music, pen trembling on the page. Focus abandons my brain, collecting instead like wax under my nails. […]
The black and white sign taped to Connor’s bedroom door said GO AWAY. I should have. Should have turned around, walked down to Fleming Lake, sat on the ledge above the cove, figured out a beat, taken out my notebook and written a thousand lines about how everywhere I looked I saw Carly’s eyes and […]
No one knows books like David L. Ulin. On any given day, the Los Angeles Times book critic has an assortment of books within his reach, and each one is as different from the others as the hues of the rainbow. From The Best American Short Stories 2012 to Waging Heavy Peace, the meandering memoir […]
The drumbeat of his brain, a cave dweller sonata; birch branches pounded on scorched log; the curvature of myelin sheaths, the upper elevations of intelligence, the emergence of the bipedal stranger in the dark night gazing at the moon like the flat face of the clock that reads 4:07.That has read 4:07 for the past two […]
A biker sped by, pushing 70, with bugs in his beard and grease in the crooks of his elbows. Miles of grime on the plates left him stateless. In the bitch seat, more than a weekend’s packing and two tiny flags where familiar thighs should have been. He looked like an old man, but he […]
Everything was green. The way the sun shone down made everything seem brighter than it was. The arch of trees above my head should have provided a veil from the warm spring sunshine, but it didn’t. The sun still managed to shine on everything, even the tiny black ants scampering at the base of the […]
Just about the time that you really want to talk, you can’t say a word. The train talks for you; machinery rumbling beneath you, wheels turning faster than sound, faster than vision. You look down and it’s a blur: green, brown, green. That night we curled up in the grain car, trying to compact our […]
I thought about leaving you. But you didn’t. Why did you treat me so badly? I was testing your love, but those days are over. I was a cigarette under your heel. You inhaled—admit it. If I said “stop,” you heard “more.” I thought you enjoyed a little rough play. Besides, who had who in […]
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