When I took my final breath, I felt no pain and so I thought, fleetingly, that I had escaped death. In the time it took to inhale and exhale, a deeply tucked-away image burst on the surface of my mind.
Years ago, a volcano
When I took my final breath, I felt no pain and so I thought, fleetingly, that I had escaped death. In the time it took to inhale and exhale, a deeply tucked-away image burst on the surface of my mind.
Years ago, a volcano
After the fall I picked myself up,
slipping my collarbone
under the collar
and smoothing the lumps in my pants,
lifting up my arms as if I’m reaching for something that’s out of reach,
how do you know if it’s out
Mr. One
If Nathan wanted to know where I was, I was thinking, he could come and look for me. He couldn’t obligate me to sit at a table with that man when he was the one who accepted the invitation. I’d told him to decline
When the real becomes unreal and the unreal real: A Conversation with Xu Xi about Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations
Xu Xi 許素細 has authored or edited nineteen books, most recently This Fish Is Fowl
My mother was an optimist, my father was an optometrist. They opened up the shop at a time in Brooklyn when you didn’t have to be so serious about a thing like that. You could have a little fun, you could put some of yourself
When I was young, bedtime meant shrinking beneath the covers in case the Devil found me. My parents said you could tell he was there by a sudden sense of dread, and the smell of excrement on the air. The small crucifix they
X lives over the USA Fried Chicken and Pizza Halal on Hancock Street. He goes by X because he doesn’t have a name and the people at the boys’ home in Williamsburg said that he was wearing a raggedy Star Wars t‑shirt
A small lighted cruise boat crawls around a bend in the canal. The murky brown water is shallow today and much of the garbage that’s normally concealed is visible. It floats here and there. Some is stuck to the muddy bank.
The
These are the first days of spring. The breeze at dawn
pumps petrichor to the tune of birds chirping relentless cheer;
that gap between pounding heart and sluggish mind. A woman
and cat lie in bed, waiting for the day to begin.
The cat says let’s eat
The dream starts, stops, picks itself up. Suppose I breathe sometimes. So what! Not easy! Never was. To relax. Do nothing. And breathe. Well, it must be nice: all that nothing, all that breath. Anyway, here’s what
This morning, the doctor’s nose twitched along, trapped in a web of spider veins, as he used jargon and acronyms. As he said cancer of the breast, instead of just saying breast cancer. As you sat there, wearing that damned
Heroin is a mother drug. It puts you in the warm safety of the womb where everything’s fine. – Tom Verlaine
Everyone loves heroin. Opium, morphine, laudanum (those were days), methadone, codeine, Robitussin,
I swear the boy at the bus stop
will never get away with
whatever he thinks I am,
a fucking cunt he says,
kicking a spray of rocks and gravel
that peck like roosters at my bare shins.
Because I’m fifteen, I fork his lawn,
white plastic prongs
The day after I finished my first semester of college, I drove up to Utica to house-sit for my aunt and uncle. Having nearly failed out of my computer science program three times in less than a year, I decided to ditch the
Under more typical circumstances I’d show up at your place wearing my stirrups, carrying a bottle of chardonnay.
But not today. Don’t ask me to come around.
I would love to “drop in,” as I used to do, sporting a fez
We thank everyone who submitted to this issue. Special thanks to Senior Editors Kim Chinquee and Elizabeth Wagner. The next issue will be April 2023, accepting submissions April 1–14. Meanwhile, we hope you enjoy the readings.
Don’t sleep on the wormup!
You’ll never make it out if you try.
On Long Island we saw a dead eel,
silver-blue
Stomach leaking in terror.
It looked like a sausage.
No one ever tells you life is going to be so inspiring.
We watched the first explosion from our laboratory and it freaked us all out. I looked at Ed, his big thick framed glasses reflecting the mushroom cloud: a towering monstrosity, a hand of desolation reaching up from the desert,
You and he will star in 140 episodes. You will be a damsel and a werewolf, an opera star and a jealous clown, a dominatrix and a detective. You will nickname the camera Gregory, from the Latin word Gregorious, meaning watchful.
There may be a grandmother somewhere who would be willing to carefully collect a drop or two of your tears and mix them with a sprig of rue and a lock of your hair. At this point you can forget all of the advantages that you