She pauses in her slow crawl along the furrow that must yield beans, and wipes a dirty hand across her face. She squints skyward. The jets are in formation again. Practice. It must be practice. Please be just practice. She braces as the rush of the planes’ noise hits her. She pulls a handful of […]
‘A Totally Wild Idea’: The Writing and Realms of Eloise Klein Healy On a sunny September day in Sherman Oaks, California, a gray Portuguese water dog greeted me at the door of prolific poet and publisher Eloise Klein Healy. If it’s all right, I have some things to show you, Healy said as she […]
[translated fiction] Where was he coming from? The question lacked any possible answer. Other than “from home.” For the following reason: a cat never arrives anywhere, he returns. Each time I see him returning from his walk, I tell myself the same thing. That’s the feeling a cat always gives you. Even when he sets […]
[fiction] All the food is kept in the house kitchen. Yon and I, like all the kids but Symboline, aren’t allowed to go there. Symboline, the oldest of us all, brings out bread for children who’ve been nicest to her and flicks crumbs at the others. After she saw our first kiss the other week, […]
we, the grandmas practicing tai chi
in the public library, we the aunties gossiping
over mahjong and tea, we the pacific mall karaoke /
queens, we the tender queer who finds self care
in astrology, stakes their dreams on something bigger. /
we the kid who crosses out her poetry
so she can become a doctor.
A. Description The Work’s medium was oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus, birthed one December day in 1960, Brooklyn. Boy child from brush strokes of Puerto Rican mother and Haitian father. Face framing wide-set brown eyes and wide refined nose. Our eyes are drawn to the thin line that divided his naked torso in […]
Centuries of history consolidated in a single lecture, a fiery star. Our teacher did not make eye contact as she spoke. I do not think she could have if she tried. All the kids were staring down at the carpet, drawing imaginary lines with the tips of their fingers. She stared straight ahead, through the walls. Her words carried the weight of each body lost to the atrocity. That incalculable multitude, not even given the courtesy of a statistic. When those words fell upon us, our bodies became vessels of historical trauma and sunk below the surface of the earth.
A sonic crack and the ball soars like a comet, like it might remain another white speck in the night sky, like it’s a guaranteed walk-off home run. Except that the left-fielder, who, till now, has appeared hobbled by the rumors of his impending free agency, is tearing towards the wall, not even glancing up […]
[fiction] I whizz by houses in my old neighborhood at such a speed that they are just a blur to me. The sirens are blaring from behind, getting closer and closer. I kick my piece-of-shit Dodge into fourth gear and push the accelerator to the floor. There’s a jolt and it feels like we’ve jumped […]
“You don’t say no to me,” my colleague said in a thick drawl. “This isn’t over.” The phone line went dead after the threat—his revenge to my rejection of his business proposal. I didn’t own or want a weapon, but that day I feared for my safety at work. The muscles in my jaw tensed […]
[translated poetry] Soldiers Are Sleepless Prey Do the coarse fingers of soldiers who are fighting wars touch their children’s soft hands? Did they ever know tenderness? Were soldiers who are fighting wars born soft-skinned babies with a refined laughter? Did their mothers bathe them with hot water and laurel soap and smilingly comb their hair? […]
Driving home from the ranch across the high desert, Enzo measures the length of a coal train, setting the odometer at the caboose and racing westward toward the engines. Tess photographs lightening that cracks the sky. Eight-year-old Sophie sleeps in the back, wrapped in the sweetness of trust. Home in Los Angeles, Enzo needs to […]
Mami used to tell people that I was a very delicate boy. My parents instilled in me to do right and to avoid hurting others. I took it to heart. I always assumed that if I treated people the way I wanted to be treated, people around me would do likewise. It was the golden […]
The streets near abuela’s would crumble with each step so we’d run the two blocks to Don Lalo’s bodega, where we’d snatch tamarindo and Rancherito’s from plastic shelves within our reach and pay with smiles and small-handed pesos. He’d smile back, his gold tooth a flash of every hissing summer we’d spent chasing frogs around […]
[fiction] Part I Elsie Wood, Stenographer, Age 19 Late The sun’s long gone when I pull on my woolen coat, set my hat on my head, dash outside for the trolley, late, and I can only hope I haven’t missed the car that will get me to Washington Street on time to get the next […]
(after Wilkins)
What I remember is walking inside the house, being asked if I wanted a drink. It may have been Pabst or Natural Ice or Bud Light or Budweiser or Corona. I don’t know. I don’t know what I drank. I’m sure now that we talked, in a group or alone. I can hear myself laughing, full throated and boundless. We might have played dominoes smacking them onto the wooden kitchen table or knocking with our knuckles when we had no bone to play.
What I remember is nothing, nothing and then the wall near the bed, pale and cold, staring at my face partially submerged in dark sheets. Eyelids weighted by mascaraed lashes, I looked at the white wall and waited.
Calling Txiv thiab Niam At six years old, True wrapped his right arm over the top of his head and touched his left ear with his right hand. That was the test to get into primary school in Laos. His fingers inched towards the tip of his ear in hopes of getting into school. “You […]
I stand in the closet choosing which of my father’s belts my mother will beat me with. Bridle, latigo, braided or smooth. His tastes contain so many fashions. Night cow hanging on top of the hill breaking grass— when they come for you do not give your skin. Countless children depend on your escape over […]
0.1 We race distinctly American. .2 The run in itself is familiarized as 26.2 miles—a half 13.1. Here, we change to meters as the distances shrink: a 10K is more impressive than 6.2 miles in the same way that a 5K sounds further than 3.1. And yet with the marathon, there is something less glamorous […]
She wakes up to a clatter. She opens her eyes and sees a raccoon skate across her counter, knocking her frying pan and all the empty cans of beans across the floor. From her place on the soggy couch (which is less soggy than it was yesterday, or the day before), she looks at the […]
I am at my classroom door. I reach for my key, unlock the door, prop it open, and turn the key again. Open, but locked. I stand at my door, look up inside the frame, and pause, for the most important step. I reach for the anti-latch device and flip it sideways. It keeps the […]
The typewriter’s film of dust: I could have written in it with a finger. It had been a while since she’d found reason to type anything. The last thing, perhaps, a fresh list of contacts she carried around with her, knowing she could not be trusted to know, might not remember. Her family, our names, […]
My mother is an assembly line of mirrors: my too borderless hair, my two-handful hips, all the parts the mannequin would not hold. If you subtract one mother, how many are left? This problem is called adoption. My mother is a locked file cabinet. No, my mother is the one who put my mother inside […]
Here is how they disappear: Slowly, and then completely. The phone calls go from once a week to once a month, then a text message here or there; a string of emails at two in the morning full of drunk poems and questions like: How am I supposed to stop shooting dope when the asshole […]
[translated fiction] The compartment door banged open and the conductor informed us that we’d arrive in Montpellier in one hour. I repacked my things, freshened up, and went out to the corridor, waiting to see the city that would be my new home. I don’t really remember why we’d picked Montpellier for me to attend […]
I grew up loving Sherlock Holmes. I’d read all fifty-six stories and four novels multiple times before I was twelve years old. And he represented power to me. I mean, I was a small kid in a big neighborhood. And I wasn’t a badass. But language just seemed like a form of power. Intelligence seemed like a form of power. To know that Sherlock Holmes could control his world with just a brain seemed amazing to me. And so, he was always my alter ego. … I never considered writing any other character but a Sherlock Holmes character.
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