We were just leafletting. Even that felt good. It was cold but bright as we stepped into the first day of December, with Christmas wreaths adorning thresholds, doors wrapped like presents. A man on a ladder...
My brother digs holes in the ground all day long every day he would rather dig a hole or four hundred than go home to the family at dinnertime sit around the table gutting chicken picatta in silence. He would...
Rion Amilcar Scott is an MC’s MC. He creates the kind of imaginative landscapes that seem so real you wonder why you haven’t been paying attention to the world in the way that he has. But I gotta confess. I...
No child wanted to be sent to The Shredder. It hid in a concrete, windowless structure several blocks from the car towing company, the chicken factory farms, and the E-waste recycling centers. That was where...
You Don’t Have to Be Tough All by Yourself, You Said and if I returned the favor, it was much later. Or I lied. At the airport, waiting for my turn to sleep. Like a leg bone inside a grasshopper. In the selfie I sent, darkness curtains one side of...
Early in the morning the hallways of the Cancer Institute were so empty and quiet, they seemed nowhere near the crowded city of Belgrade, but in another world. While Slavka cleaned the gray linoleum floor, she felt she was navigating a giant...
I I saw the best minds of my gender destroyed by material madness, gorging hysterical spandex, hauling their Hummers, dragging children up and down Wisteria Lanes, seeking 100% money-back guaranteed certainty, happiness, Who sliced and served...
“Elizabeth, if I tell you something, will you please not be offended?” I raise an eyebrow. “If you were nineteen, I’d totally be hitting on you.” I notice that he’s got a careful margin past the age of consent there. “Well, I guess we’re...
Just Tell Me You’ll Think About It Kurt Vile on the radio trending sings “Pretty Pimpin’” and neither his assumed name or his song refer in any way to Kurt Weill and “The Threepenny Opera” – Vile’s back-up band called “The Violators.” He used to...
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 system for his cornfields. It’s a real...
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 the last day of October in 2019. Brexit...
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 always on the way & the tar is always...
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 school today, I noticed how the green and...
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...
