My wife has friended a coyote. Facebook keeps sending me messages from a slightly other world where a blind guy like myself jumps at the chance to buy expensive watches, cheap car insurance and a surveillance...
I waited for the bus. The first bus didn’t arrive for a while. I waited beneath a blood-red sun, sweating and exhausted. It was the first time in twenty years that I’d stood at a bus stop; the last time was on...
Walking into Town this road is empty for most of the day but when the log trucks whip over the ridge jake-breaking belching diesel then watch out deer the soot-stained sky glowers snow is on the way snow is...
I don’t hear the shots anymore , but I can still feel them. I feel them in every movement; each thought and perception is formed by them. I feel quite a lot, at the most dangerous times. Walking into...
Whoosh like a river moving but it’s a highway of electricity making its way along strung lines. Teams and teams of men did this, forged and hung rubbery, waterproof cables. The chemicals it took: plastic coating and metal filaments to carry our...
My mother is sick, my best friend was dying; I had to travel quite a bit this winter—Vermont, North Carolina, Minnesota, Oregon, Massachusetts. And yet the way chain stores nudge a landscape into a kind of global uniformity, there was a...
Starling Shout-Out About 60 common starlings were released in 1890 into New York’s Central Park by Eugene Schieffelin. He was president of the American Acclimatization Society, which tried to introduce every bird species mentioned in the works of...
Minutes on trains are longer than rivers. This, Chiara knows. It’s only two hours from Naples to Rome, but gazing at the grasses and soft vanilla clouds, it feels as if years have passed. Chiara sighs at the glass.“Are you sure we can’t go swimming...
The Color Cure, installation by Lee Crouch Zero Prestige through June 21 by Joy Katz The Color Cure, an installation by artist Lee Crouch, is a room whose mood changes depending on a visitor’s skin color. It’s a little like one of those “mood rings”...
Take a look at this doll, said the puppeteer, indicating one of the many homunculi scattered onstage. Take a look at this doll and try to mistake it for someone you know, anyone made of flesh and blood, perhaps a friend or a relative. Take a look at...
I will have the name because it came by way of blood and stripe. Cowhide-split skin and parchment script the tearful separation of kin...
In Kristen’s driveway by the hoop she says you know global warming is real right and kicks the bottom of her metal scooter with the inside sole of her leopard Converses. I say yes. Yes. I remember this—had seen a plastic-covered book about it on the...
that I would be the only one to return from summer camp with head lice. And that the medicated shampoo laced with rubbing alcohol would frost my tips. Nowhere to hide beneath the blonde, my skin scabbed red, dozen-or-so pimples blazing. A fact about...
When the knock sounds, she knows she’s not to open the door. Her father has warned about these woods and their inhabitants. The expedience with which the knock travels through the little house reminds her that she is alone in a box made of wood. She...
Everything’s coming up oranges. “Ollie Ollie in come free,” it’s all the statue can do to whisper. Meanwhile, cats prowl the edges of wildfires, eagles abandon their towers— dropping knee pads and hats on an underclad country. And the FLOTUS floats...
Miscalibrated coffee intake, I’m bound for the restroom, following the cis men. After row of urinals, row of sinks, one stall with a door that shuts. Occupied. The pits, men filtering in and out while I wait. The guy in the stall is silent, frozen...
Becka stretched out flat on the warm driveway, her arms and legs moving up and down on the asphalt, as if making an angel. She wondered what it would be like to have her friends over, make Jiffy Pop, and watch TV. Some of the other families in the...
these are the facts: / I am white / I am female / I am writing about the black male wearing all black / white caps on black warn of graphic content / you don’t have to watch / if you don’t want to / you can close the tab / minimize it / I am...
Winner of the 2019 SLS Essay Contest On a 100-degree June morning, Eddie Canales was driving from Corpus Christi, Texas, to the town of Falfurrias. A call came in on the Bluetooth screen of his Prius. It was from a 720, or metropolitan Denver, area...
AFFAIR You: white Deborah Kerr singing that song from the King and I—Thai kids crowd in rings, to know you. Me: Yul Brynner hands on hips, falling in love—etc, etc, etc, etc. Think flow, drum hearts, gongs. Drama: a bit too much for your husband to...
Louis McDonald, Jr. makes a wrong turn on the way to pick up his diabetes medicine at Walmart, and ends up adopting a spirited Border Collie mix. This is the inciting incident in Biloxi, Mary Miller’s second novel, a laugh-out-loud funny, heart...
In November, 1975, my ship, the USS El Paso, made a scheduled port call in Barcelona. I was excited. I’d never been there, and seeing such sights (along with escaping my Midwestern hometown) was a big part of why I’d enlisted. Almost immediately...
