Category: Issue 17

Painting by Camille Woods, a working artist based in Austin, Texas.         My dear friend started crying into her champagne, which surprised me, because we had been celebrating all night. I’d been sober for seven years, long enough to know that people sometimes cry for no reason when they’re drinking.       …

INHERITANCE  I was never the clean plate, I was the swirl of flour-white biscuit in dark corn syrup. At church I was a wide-mouthed Baptist hymn whenever my father made eye contact. Eight teabags bathing in a glass jar on the back steps, sun high and fevered, I was a hot summer. Who cares what…

Nearly five. You only know good people. You still dream of castles, of knights on horses, of growing long hair. Three states away is another shooting. Pop pop. Bang Bang. You just touched your first fake gun last week. The amusement  park buzzed like electricity ready to go out. You pointed the barrel at yourself.…

I like how people still use the phrase dead of night. It makes the night seem more exciting  and them more resigned to becoming ghosts as they move through it,  though no less oblivious to the fox skirting those trees waving  like two anemic legs shorn to the bone and waiting for the wind to…

Painting by Camille Woods, a working artist based in Austin, Texas. The Blackhawk hunkers in the pasture by the river like a video game beast, spiky and dark. Mikey slogs toward the helicopter, soaked with tiredness, lugging the baby, her ticket out. She’s ready to lie down in the sopping field, sink her banged-up body deep…

Are you the head of the household? Because I am Calling about the census— Dear, I need to speak with an adult Even if they don’t speak English well. For every call like this, my mother Gestures wildly as if we Haven’t done this a million times. I’m sorry, I say back to the voice.…

Painting by Camille Woods, a working artist based in Austin, Texas. I never thought I’d move back to Canarsie, but my mother died two months after my dad and then the house was empty, and my two useless brothers wanted nothing to do with it, and when the realtor on the phone said, “Yeah, missus,…

ELEGY WITH SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF Home is our name for the long dead workshop where we keep memory alive  by fashioning new animals to stalk  the back yard. This is a two-headed cow standing near the shed, eating everything we thought holy. This is an ancient tiger, sabre-toothed and wicked, his spiky tail wrecking the…

To test your pulse as you sleep. Bring the healer           the howler                the listening ear—  Bring                an apothecary            to mix            the tincture—           …

I am not saying he should not be loved: how shameful to try to control what makes us most laudably human— the python love that coils, that will chokehold against even the worst truths, until there’s nothing left to gag.  I have love for one of my rapists—the mercy is a stain I’ve scrubbed and…

Painting by Camille Woods, a working artist based in Austin, Texas. Read by Laura Lipson with a yawn to the rural community of Nishigun where Chieko had returned home, a minor celebrity with her newfound American-sounding English that was more slurs and mumbles than fluency. It proved useless back in the Japanese school system she…