My text-based digital photo-collages draw from traditions of urban landscape photography, collage, erasure poetry, altered books, and graffiti/street art. I digitally alter and collage onto my own photographs...
First Camping Trip Mescalero, New Mexico Overhead: the night sky like a dark hand reaching towards me. Around me, all I see are pine trees, our campfire’s light gone. I try to turn around, to go back before my...
The world has split
into a farce that plays
on two landings of the same
staircase. Yes: Treachery
gnaws the bones
of our state, so as
to tip us off, and out.
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Joe Bishop’s high school English teacher posts on Facebook that the body cam footage of his death is no better than a snuff film, and the cop responsible should go to prison for murder. This post ends her...
Under Mylar blankets the refugee children dreaming of pupusas stare through the diamond shaped holes of the fencing that surrounds them. We want you to go home, we tell them, then put them in private prisons and county jails and processing centers...
Outside my window The appearance of many cobs Without webs The naked Old lady dreams under her oppressive coverlet Her small head empty At this hour What if the rain fell sturdily The brain waving to a person In a car Did I say “coverlet” Donald...
Trump thanks God for the uneducated. I thank the uneducated for chasing me out of my dead end of Pennsylvania before it was too late, even if my exile made mockery of a Springsteen song: I had no hemi-powered drone screaming down the boulevard, but...
The news brings such terrible stories— The girl who kept texting a friend to give up the weight of his worries, and bring his own life to an end. The woman who fought against fire found dead in a national park, shamed in an unending furor— A...
I am the asteroid, the volcano, the poles shifting, the parasitic nonnative species. I am the Sumatran tiger, stalking prey in deforested villages. I am the dodo bird, awkwardly attempting flight. I am the carrier pigeon, fantastic plumage a sign of...
(Homewood Cemetery) Before I moved to Pittsburgh seven years ago a friend sent me a recording of a comic Yiddish patter song from the 1920s or ’30s. It was like one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s rapid-fire recitatives, only in Yiddish. I...
Scoundrel Time’s Elisabeth Booze talks to Chaya Bhuvaneswar about her work Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s debut short story collection White Dancing Elephants was praised by Laura Van Den Berg as “powerfully intelligent prose.” Lauren Groff calls her a “bold...
“Women have broken the glass ceiling, and we’ve achieved most of our goals.” When a female corporate vice president announced this at a leadership conference for women, before hundreds of female managers who worked for a Fortune 500 aerospace...
They had the number, Lalita divined. Now, sitting with her father and mother at the restaurant, looking at her father’s face, its flat surface smugly composed for once, instead of explosive with rage, Lalita was sure of it. Her parents, having never...
We had been standing in line for hours. Days. Months. It felt like we had been standing since the beginning of thought or reason, for centuries. Some of us had been waiting, every hour, every minute, for two years. The waiting, the desire to vote...
Day in, day out, I go over my vowels, my back-to-back consonants, my stress and intonation. I am at the mercy of an alien language. I hide under it pieces of a previous life: the memory of a first kiss in Tehran; Mom’s chador being my childhood...
I am reading about a 400-year-old document found in a gap in the buttocks of a statue of Jesus in the Cathedral of Burgos when restorers removed a piece of fabric used to cover Christ’s behind when K. says she is perplexed by her extreme repulsion...
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford grew up near me in a Washington, D.C., suburb, during the 1980s. I went to an all-girls private school near Ford’s girls’ school. I was sexually assaulted, within a year or two of the assault Dr. Ford experienced, by a boy...
Again I dream I’m stuck in a room with my rape—my rapist is long gone and it’s just me and the rape now. I could say that the rape was a beast with red eyes breathing smoke and fire at me But, no, it’s just a tired looking thing (a big one) piled up...
He said: Who is the president? And she said: George. Did she get partial credit for that? Maybe three points for the trio of Georges, or just one for the George who invaded Iraq. She couldn’t count backward from one hundred in sevens. Can you? If...
By the time I made it to the school bus, there was one seat left, the one next to Candy. I scanned each row again until Freddy the bus driver, pink and patchy face fuzz, yelled “Take a seat!” Then, a little lower, “Next time you better hustle, girl...
