The Bretspars lived in a tumbledown Cape Cod, but they were a long way from Massachusetts. The sky was the color of faded denim, not New England grey. The land green and yielding, not hard and unforgiving. The blood red and pumping, not Brahmin blue. A shelterbelt screened the Bretspars’ home from the road, spared […]
[fiction] When he was nine, he tried to catch a couple. He thought the Red Bishops, with their striking red and black plumage, would look lovely in his cage. He sat high on his perch in the mango tree, watching them fly wild and free, chirping busily, in and out of the reeds in the […]
Real boy the love I have made to you is unremarkable, as it should be in a perfect world, impossible to tell where you end and I begin. Real boy I have recessed in your nation, your looted land, pronounced it dead, & closed the borders I once bled for. Real boy I dream of […]
On August 14th, I had the honor of interviewing Jeff Shotts, Executive Editor of Graywolf Press in Minneapolis, MN, by phone. A native of McPherson, Kansas, and graduate of Washington University’s MFA program, Shotts began his career as an editorial assistant before going on to edit poetry and nonfiction. After hearing his guest lecture during […]
[fiction] Feed “#DrunkAsFuckGirl” DAF!!! LMAO! idk how i feel about what’s going on, but you should of not drank so much… ur last night on earth wuz a good one. way to go down! DAF!!! we should of charged that bitch extra! some people just deserve to have dicks rubbed on their face. LOL!!! dont […]
And the first words out of my mouth do not buck into a shield, do not blast his ears with refusal, not never, in my quiet defense something un-proud: it’s not even Muslim, as I convert that s to a z, and twist, twist my hair all of it uncovered for his ease and a […]
[fiction] How do I explain the butterfly if I don’t explain the heat? My sister and I were walking to the corner store to buy snacks with money from my grandma, who was dying. She had been dying for as long as I could remember though, so it didn’t really bother me. What did bother […]
Ahsan opened the sliding glass door and stepped out. He inhaled deeply and broke into a cough. The air was thick, murky and filled with an unrelenting stink—as if a gang of motorcyclists had fired up their engines and aimed into the yard. Ahsan covered his mouth and walked out farther. His mother had explicitly […]
Khadijah Queen (to remix two very famous quotes by Walt Whitman and Lionel Blue) contains multitudes like everybody else, only more so. In one sense, the scope of her work is so radically diverse in form and genre that it’s difficult imagining all of it coming from one author. Queen describes a literary life that […]
perched in a cricket cage the canary waits to read your life you stand, sunbound eating mamey, guanaba favas con chile, pan dulce drinking agua pura y piña drop a few pesos in the guira the marimba comes to life two men like a wind-up toy or well-trained spider monkeys play Guadalajara, two mallets in […]
[fiction] There is a room with twenty desks. Five across, four deep. “Small class size. You should feel lucky,” the principal tells him. Each desk with a book: America the Beautiful: A Sweeping History 1776-2027. Red, white, blue, and all in mint condition. They better stay that way, for his sake. The desktops are all […]
[fiction] Mā explained over the phone: a violist sprained his wrist, tumbling after a volleyball, and the octet needed to practice with a replacement before Chinese school celebrated chūnjié tomorrow. She had a habit of molding requests into commands after several hours, so I saved time by consenting. It did excuse me from the January […]
You’ve probably read David Ulin’s work in The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, The Paris Review, Black Clock, Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, Zyzzyva, Columbia Journalism Review, The Believer, and NPR’s All Things Considered. Ulin has also been a contributor to docufilms, such as Lost LA and the upcoming Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in […]
I still remember the moment I first swiped one of Francesca Lia Block’s books from my big brother’s bookshelf. Splayed out across my family’s living room floor in our downtown Los Angeles apartment, I devoured the modern fairy tales in Blood Roses with a hunger I hadn’t realized was there. Moving on to her other […]
[translated poetry] Excuse Us Excuse us for fleeing the wars that you fed with your own arms Excuse us for getting poisoned with the toxic waste buried by your powerful industries Excuse us if you’ve bled out our land, depriving us of any possible resource Excuse our poverty daughter of your richness of your neo-colonialisms […]
I slide a pinky beneath the leather band of my love’s watch and feel his humid skin. I love this virgin bracelet around his wrist, the manacle of tan line where he unbuckles the hours and becomes master of our time together. We divide one moment from another with embraces, laughter, kisses, breath. My body […]
[translated fiction] “Martín!” “Ñoraa!” “You think the river’s gone up?” “Definitely, the snowmelt’s really letting loose down the sierra, bursting like you wouldn’t believe.” “Will the cows go into the woods?” “I couldn’t hold them back even if I tried.” “But be careful on the way back, son, the river’s treacherous.” “The river won’t get […]
Yoga I have bad memories of ballet class, and isn’t yoga like dancing in a way, teaching the muscles how to lengthen, how to lean, how to turn elastic as rubber bands? All my springs are coiled tight for bouncing. My love even calls me Tigger sometimes. I watch her step out of the studio […]
Before my eyes open, I begin my day by searching for my phone. My hand runs over the covers, under the pillow, along the stack of books on my bedside table. More often than not, I find it and am plunged into the rush of notifications, which I absorb with one eye closed, because of my astigmatism. But some mornings my phone has fallen between the bed and the wall. The first time this happened I tried to carry on with my morning, feed the cats, pee, but a feeling kept sounding the alarm that I had forgotten something. I paced the apartment, into the kitchen, back into the bedroom, the bathroom. My husband was sleeping and to retrieve my phone from between the bed and the wall would be to wake him. Which is precisely what I found myself doing. And before the sun was up we were moving the mattress, so I could snatch that which brings me, joy.
The following narrative should be read alongside Tatiana Garmendia’s artist portfolio Migrations. The doilies function as surrogates for the domestic domain. Their fragility contrasts starkly with brutal memories of the night the G2 Cuban secret police took my father away for a two-year interrogation. Mounted on drone footage from a random suburban Washington neighborhood, they point to the intrusion […]
Girl’s Dresser is not my first attempt at using watercolor, though it’s among the earliest ones on my long journey to becoming an artist. This piece was created in 1991 after I had turned sixteen. The start of the year was one of my most dramatic teenage years. Second only to the year I became pregnant […]
[translated poetry] The Fourth Astral Plane We bolted from empty stores, Army bullies, Chernobyl, Afghanistan, Nagorno-Karabakh and Happy drunkards euthanized in the snow. We were afraid that tomorrow another curtain would fall, And the pogrom-happy Czar would return, or the dictator, or the terrorists, So amidst the hot Brooklyn spring we came To the Hasidim […]
There was an abandoned house a few miles from where I grew up. It was out on Mt. Mica Mine Road, past the egg farm, past the little cemetery that held just a few toothlike stones, up a big hill and then down the other side. If you did it right, if you let the […]
I was busy preparing for my June MFA residency when Kori, Lunch Ticket’s Editor-in-Chief, reached out and asked me if I wanted to interview Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich for the upcoming Lunch Ticket Issue 14. Groggy from a marathon reading session that lasted until 3 a.m. that morning, I rubbed my eyes with my fists and squinted […]
“First I use the curry comb.” Rachel’s in the passenger seat. Outside the window, the sky’s clear while the Tetons hover. The day’s so bright it hurts. “It’s important to comb against the grain,” she says. “That removes the dirt and grit. Then I use the brush. They love the brush. That’s more like a […]
[translated poetry] “Tights” She likes the taste of her knee. In the summer, she’ll eat it straight from the skin. In the winter, she’ll do so until all the cotton hair has shed on her tongue. In her head stuck on the knee, the child puts together the things she knows. An ant rubbed between […]
The Clay of Time has Grown Soft The clay of time has grown soft. The kneading of sunset after sunset has made it rise. A tiny grain of sand has suddenly split open in a dream to dispel a mystery, and only the owl weeps from a silver lock of tangled hair. The dead have […]
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