Imagine it—a four-foot-eleven, ninety-pound Jewish woman from Brooklyn with a metabolism permanently set to hummingbird, who constantly tries to shovel partially hydrogenated high fructose food into your face. Her hearing must have gone out years ago because she never...
Issue Twenty
MY WOMAN
i wail that my ama still cries over her beat husband I weep over my ammama counting her days even though I know brown women never die, I don’t know how she dosent know this I cry over days spilt over the course of hot dahl and weak chai my ama coming home to only wish...
A Flurry of Ashes
A jailer holds me down while another presses a red-hot iron against my forehead. I writhe and scream before I black out. I wake with my own shriek ringing in my ears. The guards drag me out of the dungeon and hoist me onto a cart filled with other scholars. Our...
Whitewashing Frank Butler
He is a salesman, can talk you intoa bigger barrel, can weave a tale with youas Annie Oakley, sharp eyed and lightand little as she. Build him into the manyou want him to be, shadow behindthat girl—how ordinary it all seems,blue eyed boy cutting steak acrossthe table...
Blessed
The elderly couple on the train to Portland have stopped speaking to each other. They’re both seated, pretending to read, one a newspaper, the other a paperback. They trade sighs. Pages crinkle. No one seems to be enjoying this. But no one is leaving, either, and...
If Only
It's amazing what a year in solitude will make me yearn for-- events I never liked in the first place-- overly crowded outdoor festivals with $12 bud lights and lousy cover bands, waiting in line for the breakfast buffet, the Chinese buffet, the casino buffet that...
On the incessant, inescapable, infinite, unraveling, meandering, indifferent and heartless road: A map
Here are the places we’ve traveled. To the valley in the palms of my hand. I place them down against the ground and feel the road vibrating through my skin, up my arms. The hum of it winnows its way into my bloodstream, through the musculature, into my soul. One night...
Why you never left a tip
Amuse Bouche You were conceived, quickly, against a dance hall wall to ‘You are always on my mind.’ Your mother didn’t come. Starter You emerged, slowly, on a rainy morning to cherry blossom branches scraping against the windows of the Rotunda. Your father didn’t...
What is the Cube Root of Memory
The past has us passed out in attic rooms six to a futon bed, eyes heavy after sucking smoke from lawn ornaments— or...
Ghost of My Mother Along the Atchafalaya
When my mother heard the news we were moving south, she remembered pecan pralines and dirty rice, bayous and shrimp boats, and dark heavy drapes shut against stultifying heat. She remembered nowhere to live along the Atchafalaya, U-boats staining beaches black...