Who are these foreigners who travel down stairs with their children like sacks of gold potatoes she looks at you as if you’ve squeezed her produce too hard where is it from from what house what kind of land what kind of life does she see you are cross this morning because they’ve cut down […]
Contributors 85
Christopher Citro: This Year Will Be Your Last
The traveling fair pulled into town and set up in the flats where the trains used to come through. There’s only a few clapboard shacks down there now. The fair turned them into haunted houses. You can go into Ray’s old mechanic shop, Ray’s House of Doom now, and still see him standing in the […]
Christopher Citro: On Top of an Already Losing Personality
It seemed Leon was finally doing better. That is, until he got that war monument. I don’t know who gave it to him or what they thought they were doing. Did they think it would help him get his feet back on the ground? If so, boy, were they ever off the mark. By itself, […]
Bhin Nguyen: Tailor
You dressed the living, the dead, and me, your little baby in castoff fabrics, in fragments the made-to-order shirts and skirts no longer needed to be whole. And I was so thin that anything would do— you could run your hands up my chest and count the ribs sloping as stairs before the temple gates. […]
Arlene Ang: This Morning Without the Brother
We arrive in drizzle and sit among cerements of drowning. The bus grows emptier the more faces stare out the windows: breath is perceptible only to glass. Like ghosts, clouds descend from sky and undress their way through skyscrapers. Fog moves in—the lungs, the curling hair, the blankets around the sleepers under the bridge. Outside […]
Anna M. Evans: The Professionals
We cherish what we gain through self-disguise. In satin and stilettos I perform for you: no light can silhouette my form into a woman I would recognize. I’ve taken it before you sense it’s gone as though the bulky load I need to hide is balsa light, or hollowed out inside. Such are the truths […]