Fiction |
from No. 54
“I call up Madame D. I’ve had another offer, I say. How much? she asks. Twelve and a half thousand a month, I reply. Then you’ll get the same from us, she says, and whispers, Now I own you.”
Poetry |
“The Enchanted Bells”
“He tested the timbre of the bells / The vendor had wrapped for him. / The headlines were no better / Than the ones at home.”
Essay |
“Assembled”
“Chaos theory says that things are difficult to control, unpredictable. Sometimes, trauma can be a quiet, quick wave of a hand. Nearly undetectable … Sometimes, it is the sound of car doors slamming an end to the conversation.”
Poetry |
“Against the Wind” and “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”
“In some daydreams I know my dad / enough to commit him to the VA / or to a converted storage container / spruced for aging veterans by kindly, / enterprising undergrads.”
Poetry |
“Puzzle Map”
“Made a kind of sense, her country / for her grandson to hold on his lap, turn upside down, / shake if he pressed the states down tight.”
Poetry |
“Say Your Mother Returned From Death”
“Or maybe she’s been hanging out on Willie Nelson’s / tour bus all this time, drinking coffee and sucking in / second hand weed because someone just gave him // a new bong to try out”
Poetry |
“The Holy Embraces the Holy”
“The chaplain was Muslim, Ali, // and the patient was not that kind of Texan. / ‘If only more Muslims were this nice, / the world would be a better place,’ / the transplanted lone-star said to me. // Leaning against the wall, hands behind my back, / I nodded in cold agreement.”
Essay |
“Trash”
“That afternoon, I wrote on the board: Lucille Clifton said she wanted to write a poetry that would comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
Poetry |
“Even Birds Leave the World” and “My Cloak of Not Knowing”
” … I knew I could spend / a lifetime not knowing how sorrow had become my second skin, / and that no matter how far I traveled, the sky would be the same / though disguised by different weathers.”
Essay |
“The Tiny Thread of Milk”
“My own body briefly remembers what it cannot, a time before I tasted language or knew the parts of speech, in my earliest days of naps and waking at midnight and a belly full of milk.”
Poetry |
“Slow Seed”
“Listen to a nurse tell how she holds a phone for hours / as dying patients FaceTime family. / Twenty in four days. / Tell me how she does this.”
Poetry |
“Make Your Home in the Imperfect Present” and “Two Stones”
“How many times have you awakened / to one more stage rehearsal / for the main event // that never seems to happen?”
Poetry |
“Twelve,” “Conduit” and “Permit me to write my own ending”
“Someone was in the house, in my room I tell the police. The summer / I turn 12, standing in the kitchen Karate Kid cocky. Fingers wild // with popsicle juice & the murder of flying ants, their bodies burst cranberry / on the wood parquet …”
Fiction |
“The Unnaming” and “War Story”
“A vortex of air had trapped the bird within the flag — the same flag our mother received after our father died in that faraway country.”
Essay |
“July, August” and “Maybe Tomorrow or the Day After”
“I’ve found many good books. A book on how to garden, circa 1970. A book on country drives to take and why you might. A book of the history of a little town nearby, the one with so many stone walls.”