“You eat the eyes first. Do you understand?” In the large dish a boiled lamb’s head In broth, “patcha” —lamb’s head soup. The feast of Easter; Paschal Anatolia. I dreaded the festival of the head, This ritual of eating the lamb of god, Leaving what simple sins my childhood Offered, the mouth, the hot white […]
Issue 89
Lisa McCool-Grime: Daphne’s Razor
Daphne used the razor to sculpt her pubic hair into hearts and arrowheads pointing down or on special occasions a star, or stars and stripes, or The Star hanging above the nativity. For Halloween a scaredy cat, even though I rolled my eyes. For my birthday, a peacock and rivers, my red fingernails like coho […]
Judith Ann Levison: Slipping Through a Life
The walk-in closet has its say of early dates Gone awry with a tiny brown silk, its column Shrivels upon the floor to reveal the transparencies Of violet, white veins on hands reaching for After dinner drinks, crackers with olive placed hats You later sit wilted upon wrinkled sheets, Unalarmed your thin straps keep falling […]
Karen An-hwei Lee: Song of Vayeira
Blindsided. After leaving the wreck, I looked back at a phosphor city without turning. I was not anyone’s wife. God had not commanded me otherwise. What I witnessed – who sought shelter at the last minute. Stones began to shatter and flow under the sanctuary. Yesterday, angels came to warn us. What we built lay […]
Joseph O. Legaspi: Pigs
From house to house, my sisters and I knocked on our neighbors’ doors and once let in we tiptoed into their kitchens, or beyond, onto cement patios where we emptied their tin cylinders of leftover foods into plastic pails filling up with slop to feed our pigs. Unlike clear water from a well, the stews […]
Joseph O. Legaspi: Rouge
From her floral make-up purse my mother has fished out, flipped open her seashell compact, the rabbit tail brush dabbed with pressed powder swept across my face, feathering into alabaster, a masking. Throughout my grade school performances— whether stuffed inside a tomato costume or sandwiched between cardboards to resemble a book—my mother has applied liquid […]