Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
In an unknown village on the outskirts of a small town miles away from the city, a girl not more than six years of age lives. Three hundred steps from her home, there’s a small, eerie cave. At first, it was almost an hour walk with her clammy little feet. Doing it every day, back and forth for some time, cut it by almost half…
~ Estero Recreation Center, September 2017* DAY ONE or THIS SUCKS “We’re just waiting for the water to recede.” In the gym, over four-hundred olive green cots, white blankets stamped with red crosses. A white stranger in their bedroom; brown, beautiful children smile up at me. How would it feel? All your belongings, stuffed into two black trash bags? Are the most vulnerable the…
In the moments just before anesthesia took me to the bottom of the ocean (and then back), I looked down my hospital gown and admired, for the last time, the fullness of this original body. My original body had many marvels but I always wished it for someone else—spent years daydreaming of my flesh neatly disassembled, and sent to more deserving homes. But you cannot give…
Some of its most avowed practitioners have turned away from science, its boundaries, its manipulative procedures. They are pacifists now living in the desert where, according to a comforting formulation, rigid timelessness heralds a claim of dominance. Though we are deep inside its belly I do not ask them to show me the China Lake petroglyphs… deeper into the bardo still, where the rockets are…
The box arrived in June, a week earlier than expected. From point of origin it had traveled for a month aboard a ship, across time zones and liquid borders. A few hundred miles south of the equator it was hauled off ship and onto a port city where calloused inspectors declared it fit for onward journey. It was then transferred to a cargo truck tasked…