Clare turns seventeen, three months before me, and when she said all she wanted was an adventure, I thought of the creek that runs through the woods behind my house. Swimming the length of it is the one thing I’ve done that she hasn’t. I couldn’t think of anything more adventurous to give her. We’ll […]
Contributors 94
Anastacia Renee: The City
(1) the city sits on itself like a tired woman after a long day of being black. it never excuses itself for crushing us with her weight and we don’t complain…after all, we are alive, we are drinking, we are beautiful in the rain because rain makes us blurry and we don’t have to talk […]
Rage Hezekiah: Off the Coast
I fished with my father, who fished with his, both of us learning to plunge hooks into writhing night crawlers, in hopes of luring trout and bass, scaled, silvery things for dinner. I never shied from eating their crisped skin, blackened by the grill. It all seemed natural, a slice of New England living. I’d […]
Ronald Jackson: Schoolhouse in the Woods
Aunt Tourelaine and Uncle Delbert wake me at 8 o’clock to break it to me, so I can break it to the girls, but I put on my blue jeans and red baseball jersey, run out the house without telling, run hard into hot August, through our woods and across the McGonagall farm, push past […]
Carlos Andrés Gómez: Morning, Rikers Island
Physics and light pierce the hollow stench of the forgotten gymnasium stripped naked of clocks. All the boys stopped. Offered their grief to each other like water, glancing out the only window they all shared. A single ray unfolds its warmth across the dusty belly of the thudded parquet; and here’s the miracle— another day […]
Carlos Andrés Gómez: Interracial in Flatbush, Brooklyn
We watch them do this, expand from all directions like lungs abruptly filling with water, as we hold hands and walk through the eye of another storm. A man grabs his crotch, offering it to my wife, flings a mouthful of spit and epithets towards us. Each pupil is a dim swamp flooding, silence blanketing […]