Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
People don’t grow up the way they used to. By which I mean— sometimes I store trash in the freezer to make it to garbage day. I harness the cold to disinfect my jeans. My friend lives in a garage with the landlord’s freezer. Some days, she practices sticking her head in a kitchen appliance, but gets too cold and has to stop. Rent includes…
This fall, we’re asking you to make a choice: Truth or Dare? We want to see work that deals with truth – uncovering it, hiding it, coming to a personal truth, living your truth, or work that delivers us the truths you’ve discovered about life. OR We dare you to send us your most daring work. Daring in form, content, subject, or execution. If you’re…
In Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire (2019), Mahit, a young ambassador from an insignificant space station, arrives at the city of Teixcalaan, the very centre of a rapacious space empire. She must carefully navigate the political minefield she inherited from a capricious predecessor who not only died under mysterious circumstances in a foreign land, but in doing sodeprived Mahit of access to his precious…
We never bought a food processor so I grind pork with a knife, criss cross muscle fibers, get as close as I can to the cutting board, knuckles battering bamboo. Ba prefers the rubber resistance of chew but I prefer the softness you can fold inward, dissolve under teeth. Like nothing, according to Ba. A dollop of miso, a sprinkling of bonito flakes, a glug…
We both lived on the fourteenth floor, across from one another, Building C. After a number of test runs (from what the video blindly reports) she ascends fourteen more, chair in hand. Peeling back the façade, I imagine her in a run-down box, fluorescent lights blinking mindlessly, sharing the command of a pushed button, 二十八. But these stories are far from me, nearly twenty-five years…