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  • Tomorrow Will Be Fine

    When my grandmother pulled outthe wool suit I hated and told me to take a bath,I wondered just how long it would takebefore she told me that my father wasthe thing under the blue tarp in the wagonthe men brought up from the fields,but I watched her go to the mirror and comb outher long…

  • Heidi Klum

    Because the cemetery was having a BOGO sale(“buy one, get one”) and real estate dear, my mother bought my burial plot the yearI turned eleven and broke my leg and you appeared on the cover of Sports Illustratedin the platonic ideal of a pink-and-yellow swimsuit, a form made merely of paint,a garment that covered but…

  • At a Pool Hall

    When my white friendsturn to me, upsetat my indifferenceto their conversationabout Michael Brown,I point at the lone cue ballI’d been rolling aroundthe table. I spin it and saythis is one revolutionI can control.It’s how I compressthe conversationinto metaphor.It’s the only wayI can articulatemy understandingof race in America.I ask them to ante upquarters. When the cue…

  • Anagram

    I am an anagramof my father. In America,it is anapound. It is an archaicsystem of measurement.I have my father’s eyes.I am made of lettersI didn’t learnuntil I was five.A is for assimilation,which is an anagramfor cultural exorcism.If I say I’m gladI can speak English,I mean to sayEnglish is an anagramfor God’s tongue.I mean to say…

  • Homeplace (Emerging Writer’s Contest Winner: NONFICTION)

    In nonfiction, our winner is Emily Strasser for her essay “Homeplace.” The nonfiction judge, Jabari Asim, writes: “In ‘Homeplace,’ Emily Strasser investigates family history and the remnants of a community transformed by our government’s covert development of nuclear weaponry. With careful scrutiny she sifts through long-simmering secrets, exposing the large and small costs of a…

  • What Happened After It Happened

    My mother helped me write the first poem because I knew it wasn’t           safe in there.                 Weary people, she began—the cigarette smoke drawing                     sadness in the air                               (as if I should do something with all the people).                 Walk the streets fell into the next line because it was all I                     could make happen….

  • History of the Horsemen

    A horseman was found horseless on the side of the road. We asked afterhis horse, but he had no recollection, of a horse or of his having been ahorseman. And so how were we so sure? How did we know this was aman who lacked the very thing that defined him? We knew because weourselves…

  • A Life in the Theater

    After her husband died she sent herself to other worldsBelfast and Paris and some other ununited states—to bein places—as she put it—that felt as strange as the strangenessof the other earth under the one we dream we are standing on. She took pictures of the beyond and sent them over.She wrote some things but not…