Amuse-Bouche

What to Expect When You Become a Bell There will be hands. A litany of them. You will be lifted by the saffron cuffs of a temple priest, tuned lip tapped against your sister’s to synchronize every supplicant heart to the beat of rapture. But don’t fear— between blows, something will persist. You will be […]

“The map is not the territory”-Alfred Korzbyski This quote reveals the physical motivation behind my involvement in creating sculpture. The source of my ideas comes from nature and nature also provides the materials for the pieces themselves. Willow, dog fennel, phragmites, hibiscus, pine bark, bamboo and marsh elder are examples […]

[fiction]  Your lips taste of dust and salt. Your baby hairs glisten, limp commas and parentheses. In the mirror, you examine your freckles. You avoid looking at your chest. You dip your foot in the water (too hot), force yourself to keep it in, smothering it with one hand. You sink deeper into the bath, […]

The End of Cursive One day, fog rolls up from the pond’s dull mouth, skims our face, dissipates. The songbirds appear misplaced, greedy. How quickly the sparrows drop pathside to scratch for winged seeds lying golden among the goose turds. The fog’s unraveling strands are cursive, you say, scrawled in a vanishing ink. I recall […]

[fiction] My father is home. I find his jacket and his cane and his wool hat piled at the door. There is a melted snow path that leads into the house. It’s been a few days since I’ve seen him, but I feel a sense of happiness that he was able to take his morning […]

[creative nonfiction] “I ain’t got no food in the refrigerator,” Auntie Jill’s voice barks from my phone. As a kid, she terrified me—and still does, at forty-three. I reduce the volume to one bar. We are planning my stay with her in Detroit over Memorial Day. To friends, I’ve dubbed this sojourn a Guilt Trip, […]

Cast away the coins closing your lids. Roll off the stones weighing your limbs. This is what we know: Every Good Book when in doubt is named again. We inherit the sins of our glossolalia, secreting the Divine like sex. The seat of the soul is in the genitals, the road to Mecca, Jerusalem, Damascus […]

As an artist and ecologically-minded humanist, I am interested in performing history and historiography through visual means, giving careful consideration to the materials I use. I am currently working on Talk Story, a multifaceted long-term project, spanning four continents and five centuries of territorial expansion and human movement […]

Education for Bastards Listen—you could be anyone. Other kids say they know their fathers, but marriage? That’s a knot made for plot twists. What’s better than Imagination? And her pedigree’s as full of holes as yours. She stretches across the unknown, she makes new stories, she flies through the galaxies and back. Her best friend […]

[poetry] I June 25, 2013 i’m in Mom’s office helping her pack for her new home the last home where she’s going home to die I want you to have this she says handing me a yellow post-it it’s a quote that she wrote “In the end it’s not the years in your life that […]

Into The Fifth speaks to the force of a paradigm shift, as I experience the world transitioning from one dimension to the next. During the creative process, I experimented with sculpture, photography, homemade activated charcoal paint, ceramics, 24k gold, and collage, allowing my creative process to flow through me, without or without thought. In each painting […]

Blue-green watery globe tugging to a red core we are a distant comet, white cloud of unburnished rocks, frisking the heavens for an arc to earth, sea, home. Green-brown Palestine, cactus fruit and wild thyme, olive orchards, cypress trees… we travel on your mountain tops tethered by voices from suitcases and the yaw of blackened […]

[poetry] Husband Ghazal He who cuts the head from the chicken gets the heaping plate; he breaks a wing with a quick snap, slurps marrow, gravy dripping. He falls asleep without swinging. We sing. I am wrist-bound to static eternity—like Daphne, but a plastic houseplant. Don’t put your hair up he says as he slinks […]

I was born and raised in Shanghai. By the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping initiated a more open-door policy, but I still had a deep desire to experience America as well as Western culture. Immigrating to Boston to study art in graduate school, I discovered a more complex society than I had imagined. Longing for a democratic system, I wasn’t prepared for the magnitude of consumption […]

Dana Johnson is the writer of the short story collections Break Any Woman Down and In the Not Quite Dark, and the coming-of-age novel Elsewhere, California, which was nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California, and her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Callaloo, […]