I think I first really became aware of the word “beautiful” when, as a young woman, I lived for a while in New York City. The adjective was everywhere, so it seemed, describing anything from a club to an oyster to a state of mind. “Oh, you’re going to that party? Beautiful.” “You won’t believe…
As the war droned on, my wife’s Saigon university finally paid her salary after we threatened a lawsuit, paying her all at once at the end of the school year in so many packets of devalued piasters that we had to carry it away in two suitcases, making our motorcycle trip back to our apartment…
South Diego says we must caffeinate before the Satanic tour. In a French press, he pours boiling water over coffee grounds, grown and roasted in his village outside of Tulancingo, Hidalgo. We’re sitting at his dining table in a nondescript flat in the guts of the Centro Historico in Mexico City. He says it’s his…
1793 It begins when a three-year-old girl, the daughter of a doctor, dies at her family’s home in Philadelphia. Within a week, yellow fever infections have been reported throughout the city. “Tis a sickly time now in phila.,” the diarist Elizabeth Drinker notes on August 15; “there has been an unusual number of funerals lately…
“. . . home is where our stories are, and that’s not just a question of ethnicity or even country . . .” —Joy Kogawa, Itsuka Alberto Fujimori caught the world’s attention in 1990 by becoming the first person of Japanese descent elected to lead Peru—or any nation outside of Japan. His extravagant campaign and…
1. I couldn’t tell you what we saw in Tod O’Neil, or what we feared. Maybe it was a matter of timing: Tod had that lion-tamer’s knack for knowing just when to crack the whip, a blunt force of personality with which he kept his friends in line. Not that we were his “friends,” exactly—we…
Silence. Being silenced is a common experience for people with disabilities. Society is uncomfortable with our voices, which are regarded as unwieldy, awkward, too loud, too quiet, too scary, or strange. When we are allowed to speak, others want to control the narrative. They want to read a story or poem that explains the difficulties…
Paragraph means “to write beside.” I sit beside myself, writing. I sit beside my brother’s lungs, listening to the hissing oxygen tank he also sits beside, transcribing his story of breath: scraping, wet, sticky, low. I write beside his slow strangling, struggling to inhale even when he is sitting still. Even when he runs out…
A good barbershop tells you who owns it, and that’s so with Blue Spark in Baltimore. Bill’s place is plastered with stickers advertising tattoo parlors and breweries and garage bands and the city itself: BALT superimposed over a rat. Skulls are popular, as are likenesses of Edgar Allan Poe. Bill calls Poe the city’s first…
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