Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
et facta est lux In the language you struggle with, light is something you open like a door, and kill like a bird, neck wrung into cursive in your warm hand. The inside of an egg is white and red. There is only one word for for, on, in, into, at. Everything has an interchangeable sex, or perhaps none at all. On long night…
Translated from the original Chinese by Jianan Qian and Alyssa Asquith The old men liked to say that our village was our world. I couldn’t accept this, and from the beginning, I felt that I didn’t belong. I wasn’t interested in farm work or gossip—whose sons were feuding for their family estate, whose wife had had an affair, who was the manliest, who had been…
Anni Mirabiles Gnawed women warned me: love is something spiteful spat at us by the stars. Lust, a spit we tie ourselves to turning grinning crisping for a brief feast. Wide-eyed, I watched people slice into each other daily, sharpening, serrating utterances with nonchalant malice, then bearing down, sawing away until hilt hits gristle. No one could steer me toward worldly survival. Hopeful, I grew…
lupine dance in the blow-by of trucks then rest while hummingbirds taste their sex I sit by the side of the road with an old dog chewing on sour grass wait for the sun to slide down listen to twilight birds wander home through streaks of late summer light like in a happy dream and watch boys climb trees hoping they’ll reach their victory fort…
The Girl Who Talked to Paintings For Katharine Millet, the original subject of John Singer Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose Painting, 1885-1886 I. Syllable by syllable, my father’s words bore into me. Metal-edged, spiked, they always lodged in the most tender tissues— curled on the floor at the base of my bed, I made myself small as a seed. I pressed my cheek against the green…