Category: Issue 31

As a graduation present, Janie’s mother bought her a plane ticket to Budapest. “Not that I want to give my tourist dollars to those skinheads,” she said, referring to Hungarian society in general. “But someone needs to check on Eve.” She had not asked if Janie had other plans for the brief interval between receiving…

after K-Ming Chang’s “Footnotes on a Love Story”   The greatest day of his life isn’t when his son is born. It isn’t when he learns he’ll be a father (for many hubris-heavy years, he thought he’d never* be one). The greatest moment isn’t his wedding, after he fell for his wife so deeply, surprising…

I was helping my roommates, hanging up a pumpkin balloon for Halloween, when I got your text message saying you were in town. This was my first American Halloween away from my parents, far from Farsi, a world of English consonants, sour cream and meatloaf. I started typing in English, inviting you to the party,…

Before she divorced me, Layla ran the South Oats Sea Camp. Technically, I ran it with her though I only oversaw the ropes courses, checking the equipment for cracked helmets and fraying lines. The salt water did a number on them, was slowly eating away the entire camp, and we’d long since burned through Layla’s…

an arrow at the end of a line—the assumption: that it would continue on forever. Lessons in spontaneity: old men, shirtless, doing volleyball. Somebody conceiving of a lattice bridge. Each crossbeam, in summation, holding up a road. Anglers returning an underweight fish from the line, un-arrowing the hook from its lip. Elisions accreting into distance.…

  into the fire       out the window  at the cardinal   clinging           to the broken  branch      limp            like a dislocated finger  at my feet           slippered & sore            from keeping  up        at my children  yes       their screaming                        at my children their faces       …

Raised on calcified milk, the students stood under a bridge[1]. In their hands, blank sheets of paper flutter. Nothing came of that long season but a few good photographs. How cleanly their faces fit into the frame of their parents. For thirty four years there was nothing in between. When I try to fill it…

  Not having the book not remembering what it said stunned awake into sheets’ tissuewrapped old dress dank from years’ saving dusty gritty cement floor little windowless room who knew what children could get up to crack of sunlight outside stairs leading down to it push open the door whatever took place still lingering don’t…

Gate of Pain  Come sleep by me, Dad says, delirious as the hurricane taps, then knocks, impatient— I enter, a tall shadow in his room, bringing him his cup of water. I am 20 now. I’m fine, I say. The power will be out for days, the branches strewn across the roads, trees fallen into…

The Chronicle   At the end of my childhood, which appears now to me in dreams as a camp, God called each and every one of us to the hall and handed us our griefs. “You become adult now,” God said, a knife edge in His voice. For a certificate, my grief was as thick…

The dusk’s taut silence is siphoned by a low howl fleeing a dog’s throat.  A song from deep within the bones, seething in the throat. I remember the family dogs fighting in the kitchen. Teeth deep in the flesh coloring their mouths  with murder. Blood ran under the table, collecting like a slippery story leaving…