MASTHEAD Guest Editor Gish Jen Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Assistant Editor Gregg Rosenblum Assistant Fiction Editor Maryanne O"Hara Associate Poetry Editor Susan Conley Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O"Malley Assistant Fiction Editor: Nicole Hein Kelley. Editorial Assistants: Kelly Kervick and Stephanie Wilder. Fiction Readers: Darla Bruno, Laurel Santini, Elizabeth Pease,…
Mid-August. Crippling heat. Torpor. Lungs weighed down by the stubborn air. Sudden, hyperbolic, dog-startling storms each afternoon, uninspired repertoire of kettle- and window-rattling. Who’d settle for an arrangement like this? Who wouldn’t? Too hot to do otherwise. Hard to think twice or overachieve in such weather. One is compelled to be dumb, to slump on…
from a memoir in progress 1. El hombre que yo amo The night before I left my mother, I wrote a letter. ” Querida Mami,” it began. Querida, beloved, Mami, I wrote, on the same page as el hombre que yo amo, the man I love. I’d struggled with those words, because I wasn’t certain…
For the first time in my life, I had writer’s block. This writer’s block was so bad, so pervasive, so debilitating and humiliating (and so pretentiously stereotypical) that I couldn’t write anything. Or perhaps, more accurately stated, I couldn’t write anything with any sort of confidence. The words still filled up the page, but I…
translated by Angela Ball When dolphins follow the boats, they dress in pink to soften the hate in men’s gazes. “How can they hate us if we make love like they do?” Many say that at night the dolphins grow pubic hair and go out stealing women. The children think that the dolphins are gringos…
In our battle against the Beatles, it was my uncle Willie who threw the first punch, and for that, he said, he should have been knighted. I didn’t argue. We fought them in 1966, the year they played Araneta Coliseum in Manila, to a crowd of over one hundred thousand people. Their visit was quick;…
When they returned home that evening, the cat was outside. She hissed and bolted from the porch at their approach, not the least bit interested in going inside, where they had left her. The play they had seen had been by e. e. cummings, enacted entirely upon a stage floor slanted surreally towards the audience….
translated by Angela Ball The people of this town are allowed to have as many masks as they can buy. Our parents work, and we have fun playing blind man’s bluff and cowboys. The closets are full of masks, but on Halloween the chief of police prohibits disguises. That night the masks have to talk…
In August, the summer after her ninth-grade year, the girl-pudgy, moonfaced, with dull brown hair and new breasts-met the man who became her first husband. Before that, she’d been seeing a tall boy she danced with at junior high graduation, starting with a concentric-circle wheel-dance the chaperons employed to pull the boys and girls from…
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