_____ Mark Blickley grew up within walking distance of New York’s Bronx Zoo. He is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center. His latest book is the flash fiction collection, Hunger...
Entertainment
Hi, This Is Your Neighbor
Attention Volunteers: Due to ____________, we have updated the Get Out the Vote script as follows. Further changes will be uploaded to this site weekly daily hourly on the minute. Please note, we have...
2018: A Counter-Factual
Hillary Clinton limps into her second year in office badly battered and in poor humor. She has lately refused to hold press conferences, or even speak off-the-record as she had done regularly in the early days of her...
You Don’t Know Until You Test It
If a Cheerio rolls under the refrigerator, I think I’d stick my hand under to get it out. It’s scary what’s under a fridge, believe me. And I’m human. But I wouldn’t hesitate. I see it all the time from my sky...
Food & Drinks
A BRIEF HISTORY OF KYIV
Yaruslav the Wise holds the city in his hands. Its domes and alleys constructed themselves in a dream of how best to manage the hill above the Dnipro. He has a Tatar face, fur-trimmed hat, robes of an idealized medieval...
Dear V: Two Poems by Margo Berdeshevsky
The Letter that Could Not Be Sent Dear V: Listen: I would have thought, it being winter right now, that drinking Borscht is better for keeping the soul warm than drinking Kool Aid, but what do I know. I’m just a...
I am an elevator
attached to a brutalist construction— I see city blocks that fall asleep amid prickly weeds I see a skein of geese that land on the surface of the lake like it’s their job to surprise on demand _____...
Lifestyle
Bounded Functions
(an excerpt from To Those Bounded) I’m sitting at a desk, alone in a classroom smaller than any other classroom in my middle school. Every half an hour a teacher or the school resource officer enters to make sure I’m...
Rubinstein’s Chopin
This inch-thick, square box was familiar from my childhood: the sturdy, waxy cardboard, its paper cover glued onto the top of the album set like a fifth-grader’s découpage. I used to open these boxes like gifts, lifting...
Latest articles
Water Talks
VIRUS AND STREAM It was August. The stream ran low but was busy with creatures seeking to cool off. One day a little human stood on the bank, and sneezed, and a virus entered the stream. Stream said, Are you singing...
An Interview with Lan Samantha Chang
Lan Samantha Chang’s The Family Chao, released this February by W.W. Norton, on the surface, is a story about a Chinese immigrant family and the death of its patriarch. It is also a portrait of America, its many...
WE FOLLOWED THE AMERICAN FLEEING, FLED
The ash sift settling on our cars and lawn furniture, the towering gray cumulus clouds, the smoke everywhere searing our eyes, throats, burning lungs, choking the shrouded streets, the way the cremated fumes seeped...
Revolutionary Letter to Diane di Prima
“not killing all the white men, but killing the white man in each of us. . . .” —D. d. P., “Revolutionary Letter #32” Even now there is the desire, but what to do after Jan. 6— the militias and the “boys,” their...
“The Perishing:” An Interview Between Natashia Deon and Meghana Mysore
“We have to tell the stories of folks who have no stages and no film to capture them,” says one of the characters in Natashia Deón’s The Perishing. Deón’s novel moves between the past and future, following the...
The Black Girl At Your Party
circa 1970s My plaits and ribbons brightened white spaces for a long time Fat immigrant ribbons in every Color held my Thick Jamaican hair American black girls didn’t wear fat ribbons They had beads that made music when...