Amuse-Bouche

In one year, my father died in a crash due to complications of diabetes; I had two surgeries reserved for women 20 years my senior; and I became the guardian for my 92-year-old Grandmother Emma, in the end stages of dementia. My mother, and each of her eight siblings, had diabetes and high blood pressure by age 50, bunions by 55, some form of cancer by 60. […]

On September 26, 2009, at about a quarter past one in the morning, while outside, a cloudy night sky was closing in on Padua, he, lying on his king-sized futon next to his profoundly asleep wife, was shaken by a violent cough. Eyes staring into the dark bedroom, he was overcome by the age-old fear […]

Rebecca Solnit gets the title for her work The Faraway Nearby from Georgia O’Keefe. “From the faraway nearby” was how O’Keefe would sign letters to the people she loved after moving from New York City to rural New Mexico. Says Solnit, “It was a way to measure physical and psychic geography together” (108). It is […]

Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World is a historical fiction novel set between the 1750s and 1810s, encompassing the time frame of the Haitian revolution. Carpentier creates an alternative history to the popular narrative of Toussaint L’Ouverture. The story is narrated by Ti Noël, an uneducated slave of the French plantation owner, M. Lenormand […]

In the bestselling medical ethics-centered nonfiction work The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, author Rebecca Skloot uses primary resources, including one thousand-plus hours of personal interviews, to piece together a life—Henrietta Lacks’s—lost too soon to cervical cancer yet forever immortalized, thanks to the science of cell culture. Like a wedding cake, the book is rich […]

Ammi and Abu, and that brother of mine— / They don’t know who I am. Curfews & calls / to prayer, weekly lectures at the mosque, / but then, there’s also the smell of bacon…

“Coming from an ethnic background and living in a diverse city like Los Angeles, my work reflects my identity as an Asian American…”

I want to die the way my dog sleeps / a tiny, take-up-no-room-curl. / I want to live like him, too, / rising twice or thrice a day, / a lift up from a stomach, / a grin to an n, / a head-to-tail unfurl…

I lost my virginity while the dragon fell. When the enormous canvas beast faltered, people flocked beneath it. Maybe they hoped their attention would encourage it to stay aloft in the dead air, like zealots of a dying god refusing to believe its power could ever wane….

The following three found poems are from the collection Roger That […]

I haven’t been to the place where my father isn’t buried, only ashes and the idea of him. I haven’t said my goodbyes over the patch of grass where his body doesn’t lay….

I construct intimate artworks that investigate the gross romance between person and location…

Here’s the peach bathroom / that gave her new ways / to look taller—

Our eyes tripped over a four-by-four inch bronze memorial embedded in a sidewalk in Cologne, Germany…

There was a pecan tree that dropped nuts across the crabgrass that surrounded her parents’ bungalow-style home. She introduced me to her rat-dog and its seven grown puppies that surrounded me, yapping away my patience, each of them dirty and unclaimed…