Issue 97

  A girl in Minnesota was put on a diet. For her mother’s satisfaction she had to eat a miserable regimen of pickled beets, salted crackers, and cottage cheese. It didn’t help that, on the diet’s second day—which drew out even longer than the first—the girl was given the nickname “Thundering Tits.” It wasn’t the […]

  In my grandmother’s village in Sylhet, stood a gnarled banyan, from the ficus family, with warty knobs on a thirty-five foot trunk that curved forward. To me it looked like a dancer with a broken back. Its highest branches boasted wide, green leaves that shivered and hissed with the wind. Its lowest branches were […]

  26 Ways to Say Goodbye An Essay by Denise Duhamel & Julie Marie Wade * Au revoir My mother often spoke French with me when I was small. She had majored in the language, traveled to France, corresponded still with a great aunt who sent thick sheaves of accented script for deciphering at the […]

A bloody-pulp socket in my mouth was worth something. Fifty cents, at least. So I sat at the kitchen table to twist and tug and twist—use a tissue for better purchase while the salt-iron taste proved my progress. Nobody wanted to watch but I wasn’t sure what the big deal was. It wasn’t like having […]

To Orbit the Earth The steel capsule, ridged and riveted—an oversize Can—rests suspended at street level, docked Inside the Air and Space Museum’s entrance. A bounty of white lilies mingled with spider mums, Placed yesterday, honors the trail of pilot John Glenn, Dead at ninety-five. In ’62, even a second grader, Gripped by the grainy […]

The younger woman—hollowed out, reduced To a shadow wrapped in skin—allowed The older one, nearly her duplicate, To enfold her. They had both seen the knife, A small, glinty blade with a pearlized handle, When it was set beside the younger woman’s Thigh. “But you are not dead,” the older woman, Unable to speak, had […]