At the Carousel
This content is only accessible to logged in members. Please login to continue.
Articles
What Is Caged Is Also Kept from Us
They come back to you as a signwhen someone dies, they say, a dragonfly,some dull moth skimming a mud puddle,a hummingbird in the ditch’s goldenrod.But what if they are alive? But not allowedto live? How do they return, then? Cricketunder the sink for three nights straight.Why do we call it a song? That scraping,that needy …
In Praise of the Rim Job
We once drove 900 miles—from California to Idaho—in a borrowed car, the dead-drench of summerslicking our skin with its own salt, to witnessan eclipse’s totality. The darkened sun, the skypunched through. We barely made it, but didon duct tape & faith. Bear with me. I know how easyit is to forget a journey for all …
Sometimes I Forget We’re Living in Outer Space and Have Been This Whole Time
A great many orchids, the endangered lady’s slipper for one, expend a portion of their energy creating pseudobulbs where they host ant colonies, because the formic acid ants spit at intruders gives the soil a pleasingly bitter pH. This is an example of myrmecophilia, a way of being in a love relationship with ants. Though …
Things That Repeat Themselves
This day ends in the kind of holiday where I feel knotted up in—remind me again who is the parasite and who the host? Hell-bind, strangleweed, beggarweed. A lot of people, no plants, no sky, in a small room where we tell each other how we are happy to be together. Hairweed, goldthread, devil’s-guts. A …
For a Coming Extinction
What if we are birds?Does that mean we also standon wires, tenderly, weightless.Are we in front ofor behind the red-tailed hawk?The last bird must watch us die.
On Family History and Fiction
To accompany our spring 2025 issue (22.1), we have curated a folio on family secrets (reviews and craft essays), after noticing that several pieces in the print issue include that theme. Here is James Stewart III’s craft essay on fiction: In the mid-’80s, after a job promised to my father in California failed to materialize, …
Let Me Whisper in Your Ear: A Craft Essay
To accompany our spring 2025 issue (22.1), we have curated a folio on family secrets (reviews and craft essays), after noticing that several pieces in the print issue include that theme. Here is Shara Lessley’s craft essay on family secrets in nonfiction: Two gorillas crashed a Halloween party in 1975, befuddling their newlywed hosts. For …
Knowledge and Responsibility: A Review of Morgan Talty’s Fire Exit
To accompany our spring 2025 issue (22.1), we have curated a folio on family secrets (reviews and craft essays), after noticing that several pieces in the print issue include that theme. Here is Jessica E. Johnson’s review of a novel: Fire Exit. Morgan Talty. Tin House, 2024. 256 pp. $28.95 (paper) As a poet who …
Muddying the Gulf: On Families and Secrets
To accompany our spring 2025 issue (22.1), we have curated a folio on family secrets (reviews and craft essays), after noticing that several pieces in the print issue include that theme. Here is Sadia Hassan’s review of a poetry collection. Late to the Search Party, Steven Espada Dawson. Scribner, 2025. 966 pp. $18.00 (paper) I …