Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
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…
To be examined and to be understood are two very different things. I wondered if an examination gives way to understanding upon learning one of the recipients of the 2018 O. Henry Award was Lara Vapnyar, for her semi-autobiographical fiction piece about her family friend who falls in love with a Deaf-Blind individual (“Deaf and Blind”, published in The New Yorker). I discovered Vapnyar’s story…
On a Sunday morning, I sat four rows away from a bored gate agent, phone pressed between my ear and shoulder—an attempt to ward off the woman trying to goad fellow passengers into a ‘dialogue’ about her support of “our president” and “the Wall”—listening to a friend lament the current state of literary pop culture. Their main complaint: the number of books praised as feminist…