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…
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…
1 The reader laid out a bone, a feather, a small rock, then smeared the cards in an arc across the floor. She asked Fern to choose. Fern turned over a woman leaping or falling headfirst from a tower, orange flames bursting from every window. “Oh,” Fern said. “That doesn’t look good.” “It’s not always…
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…
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…
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…
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 winterto the window to be fed?Nothing here looked like it might have already been falling apart.The woman was alive there,…
I cried in public again. Drive,I said to my beloved, drive. I can’thave people watch me cry. It’s bad enoughwatching people watch me touch fruit atthe grocery store. Prickly pear glaringacross the sweet heaps. It’s not my faultthe citrus is too soft. It’s not my faultyou blame me. But maybe no onewas watching me cry,…
Translated by Iain Galbraith |one’s still clatteringin the box, in safekeepinglike a child’s first tooth iand then it is struckin the thickest darkness: ah!here i am. or was.
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