She stands with other statues and shattered friezes like the debris of some blast or the wreckage of a sunken ship. Her pious gaze and the elegant fold of her robe add a touch of pride to the centuries contouring her face and truncated body. The incarnated goddess of death still stands, dignified and somewhat…
I’ll never forget the day I saw my first massacre. Or, rather, its fresh aftermath. It might’ve been in the context of the Ambazonian Crisis. It might’ve been Boko Haram–related. But at the beginning of the video, there’s a mountain of clothed corpses, bare feet and arms smeared in red clay, protruding from the tangle…
It’s an old garden story; it started with the fall. I was making my way across some stones that my husband had set, into a section of my garden that was obscured by weeds—big, shoulder-high ones, upstart saplings, overeager goldenrod, a mass of sprawlers and climbers like wild grape vine and poison ivy. I was…
The last prison the feds sent me to had been built on the side of a bluff in the middle of the desert. An island in a sea that had dried up around 252 million years ago. Originally, it was an Air Force outpost during the Cold War. However, during my time, it held felons…
The nurse tells me I have ten minutes to eat the radioactive eggs. “You can eat the toast, too, but that’s optional.” Then in thirty minutes, they will take the first scan. She leaves me alone with my paper cup of eggs and a plastic spoon. “Put some salt on them,” my great-grandmother Minerva says….
The youngest, my only sister, quaked in the bunk bed overhead the night the eldest brother left for college. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “The family is breaking up,” she sobbed. A murmuration of starlings floods the sky one late November sunset. Twisting in dark, iridescent waves in midair, hundreds of thousands of birds move in…
I threw myself into the ocean once, off a spit of land on the coast of Maine where the rocks stand up into a low outcropping, and the steady hands of the tide pull the sea away from the shore, out into the bay. As it recedes, the water surges past the shoulders of the…
“You all, who will emerge out of the flood In which we have drowned, Remember When you speak of our weaknesses Also the dark time From which you’ve escaped.” —Bertolt Brecht, “To Future Generations” Translation by Terence Renaud 1. “memento mori” The madness began in the fall of 2000, after General Ariel Sharon swaggered up…
1. “A crack in the walls that ordinarily hem us in.”[1] On September 7, 2017, minutes before midnight, I was alone in a borrowed house when something began to shift: an indeterminate sensation of motion, like lapping waves. I did what I had learned to do as a child, growing up in Kuwait: I looked…
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