I have been dying under these Connecticut stars all my life, relentlessly,even though the sky is different above Buenos Aires and Lusaka, eventhough the Magellanic Clouds float like blossoms of dust and couldbe seen for the price of a plane ticket. In fairness, I have Sirius andVega and Aldebaran. In fact, most of the brightest…
The anniversary of some future sadness passes every day unnoticed.The calendars bear no trace of it; the candles stay in their box. Inevery house, there’s a dead mouse in the wall that the living micebuild their nest beside. Meanwhile, it’s the usual programs aimed atthe sagging couch.
When she arrived at Grisha’s, Marina heard the fierce sound of clanging cookware. This meant Aneta was angry. These days, Aneta was always angry. To hear her tell it, she hated being a home attendant, detested old people and their smell, found Grisha a dissolute lecher and couldn’t stand dirty Brooklyn sidewalks. Their employer, VIP…
It took three weeks for Gwaza to disintegrate. Even after he was gone, his smell carried in a thick veil of flies, keeping the house door shut and all the windows closed. People walking by on their way to Church carrying gossip, or back from work with roadside onions and Friday night Chicken Licken stopped…
In fiction, our winner is Lydia Martín for her story “The Adjustment Act.” The fiction judge, Anthony Marra, writes, “‘The Adjustment Act’ is a flat-out triumph: richly characterized, gorgeously rendered, deeply humane. Aside from the author’s obvious talents, I was moved and impressed by the story’s focus on the humanitarian price of ideological conviction. Politics,…
The time will come—meanwhile you’ll add more ashes,that dirt in your hand. Goodbye, goodbye,you’ll learn to say it. What you want isdirt on the coffin, ashes in the grave.Not a glimpse, year after year, of someone on the street,turning a corner before I can seethat red plaid shirt, torn sleeve. Tender 26,bad number, risky year…
Did I know him? Yes his speed(did I tell on him, turn him in?)fell out of his pocket climbing upmy two-story steps—hmmm,what is this? crystal-like, kitcheny,condiment no wonder he talkedso fast, eyes switching back & forth,if I sat at his feet with some slownarrative. He was a chef—an excuse. Did I go to the porn…
Could you love God in a world without death? Teacher asked. And we children shouted, a bristling forest of raised yearning arms.Yes! No! Depends! We didn’t know the answer, or even the question, just wanted to beadmired for alacrity, vehemence prompted by authority. Some of ustook the opportunity to punch our neighbors, or, in our…
There’s a radio station at the left end of the dialwhere you can listen to 24 hours of genocide and war crimes;how in the south the election was bought cheap by men in unmarked uniforms;how the contaminated medicine was shipped abroaduntil babies started being born with deformed spines. —And then the big conspiracies: how the…
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