The roof hangs over our heads like a large, strange tooth, rendering us tiny sardines, flipping about nervously, in the open mouth of Dulles Airport’s whale interior: brutalist beams, overhanging
Category: lit issue 2020
—After Borges and Shakespeare I watered my own soul but I Watered yours too because who Doesn’t want more pale amber Bursting and seeping but the August Rain soaked us both saturated our Xylems we were ripe enough to eat fleshy Fleeting beauty and vases full with Every goodbye I lean Into that magnetic winter
In the summer, there’s a specific intersection on Boston Ave that is dense with familiar colors. Groceries cradled in both arms, I pretend that the paths are lined with jungle. This corner is so never-ending in its summer-ness that it just about looks like home. Now, here, I am always somewhere else. The cold climbs
I was sweating on an overly warm October day when I passed an empty baseball stadium. I want to go to a baseball game, I thought. I’m a lucky charm for underdogs. A few years ago, my dad told me that the Rangers had been on a losing streak until I showed up to their
She did not love her first boyfriend either, even though he’s your dad. Keep your options open, because she was the bougie yellow girl who wrapped Johnnie, Jean-Pierre, and Frantz around her finger. Keep your options open, because your aunt was the bougie brown girl who kept Junior, Francois, and Ricardo in her back pocket.
On the way home, Q stopped by the food cart and bought hotdogs, then at the flower stand two lilies fresh out of the water. Unwrapping the tin foil, she wondered how food-cart hotdogs always tasted the best before the first bite, and so did the “Turkish” barbeque sandwich on the way back home from
On Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights, Thea had to answer to the name Doreen. A few days ago, her first day on the job, she nearly corrected the woman talking to her. Thea frowned at the memory. She reached underneath her coat, past the rough material of the oversized scrubs, until she found the real
My mother calls me while I am on the bus and says, your sister just died in a car accident. They tell me after that I immediately fainted, right at the feet of a five year old boy. My mother, still on the phone, holds her calm and directs the bystanders to the nearest hospital,
I’m not good at the flowery or the make-believe In keeping the vines that threaten to spread beyond the arm’s reach I only have two eyes, and one sad mushy slop in my head Two hands with which to grasp at—to tear and pick In as many ravenous ways as possible Maybe a leg or
Dear Reader, I did not know how to speak when I came to this country. Wide-eyed and Cyrillic-sympathetic, I learned English at age five. My parents often tell me that I cried on the way home from the first Monday of school because I thought all the kids spoke Kyrgyz. English did not yet exist
We live out a phase of utopia and short and long hair. & We use future scissors and future lengths of string. & We live with a secrecy; ecstatic and electric. & We have future bodies that are current bodies. & We laugh
When I was 17 and she was 18, she and I decided to get a cheap motel room. We thought it was a preview for what our life would be like once we got our own place. It was a cold February night, with buttery clouds streaking across the sky. The end-of-winter chill glittered in