Poetry

Duplex (I Will Tell You)

I will tell you all about desire. One night, a man picked up his bag and walked.           One night, my father picked up his bag and walked,           His big brother became the story. My big brother once told a story, He ended up choking on a stroke of joy.           If rightly stroked, would you choke…

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The Land of Long Days

Everywhere, there are rainbows—on the stairs to Girls’ Block, around the bulletin board announcing our meals for the week, on the playground equipment where we sit during Outdoor Time. (Sometimes Nayeli goes down the rainbow slide, and we follow her, laughing like it’s a big joke—us, pretending to be kids.) There’s a rainbow on the…

3D-cover 483

Zara

1. When she was twelve and I was ten, Zara stole a handful of henna stickers from my mother’s beauty parlor and applied them up and down her chest. “Boob tat,” she captioned the selfie on Facebook. In the two hours it remained available online, Zara’s adorned sternum reached every aunty in the Jersey Shore…

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Number 474

Translated from the Korean by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton 1 An ordinary-looking man was not what I expected. He was of average height, at five feet six inches, and had a compact build. His body was marked with scars and blemishes but bore no tattoos. I detected none of the anxiety and fretfulness that convicts…

The Falls

Two boys sit on a log washed white by the tides and wind. A driftwood fire hisses on the sand. Down the beach, the black waves roar. It’s August 1995, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. One boy, one teenager, is pale. The other is dark. Between them, they pass the bottle of Scotch…

MOLE PILE 12

THE CLUMSIEST I   When I pulled the book down, only vaguely curious, it fell open to fighting bulls. People seemed glad when the bull was driven in. It has a pretty red breast, but because it comes in winter to the window to be fed? Nothing here looked like it might have already been…

I CRIED IN PUBLIC AGAIN

I cried in public again. Drive, I said to my beloved, drive. I can’t have people watch me cry. It’s bad enough watching people watch me touch fruit at the grocery store. Prickly pear glaring across the sweet heaps. It’s not my fault the citrus is too soft. It’s not my fault you blame me….

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Translated by Iain Galbraith   |one’s still clattering in the box, in safekeeping like a child’s first tooth     i and then it is struck in the thickest darkness: ah! here i am. or was.