did not disappear slowly, as some rivers do, paved over in a cracked laminate of asphalt and concrete, its flow dwindling into a thin necklace of puddles edged in phosphorous green. No. It just slipped away in the night.We walked out onto the bridge and peered to where weeds lay flat and lank as wet …
Once we had a flag we were proud of. In this land we’ve lost our searchfor a place to lay down the pain.The flag waving makes our hearts sink. Half-longing, half-dreading, we recite prayers should another day appear and find us choked with fear. Pleading. They whip us. Sing from the heart! But the heart …
a golden shovel with Adam Zagajewski What came to us sounded like mystic music:at first, a chorus of Gregorian monks heardfiling past the juniper tree, though now we can say with certitude that the music we heard came through pipes. You heard the first hum in the bathroom—it wasstartling, the way things are when you’re …
We ate hair every year my grandparents visited, slick with the odor of a living force. For good luckI chewed strands & swallowed. After Koung Koungdied, I learned of black moss stripped from the roots of grass, earth left exposed to the wind, land turnedinto desert. In the high desert where I live, eyes light …
I exit my rideshare and find the pamphlet from Aunt Mi’s funeral in my jacket pocket. That must be the last time I wore this suit, my only suit—three years ago. Funny: one last joke between us. The Rowe Art Institute’s facade sports two dark banners announcing Miriam Ackerman’s (After)Prints: The Digital Second Life of …
When the clinician inserted the tent of seaweed into my cervix, a practice as outdated as Japan’s abortion laws, the tiny stab caused an involuntary jerk and gasp. She firmly pressed one of my knees with her free hand, saying, “Deep breath.” As I exited the room, I nodded, a slight bow to answer hers, …
A binary star system consists of two stars that rotate around a shared center of mass, appearing to orbit each other. To the naked eye, they are indistinguishable, existing as a single point of light in the night sky. Only through a high-powered telescope can the stars be differentiated as they sear the space around …
Lydia did not vacuum the floors or dust the overloaded bookshelves when the men started returning three years later, in small groups of fifty or five hundred at first. She did not stoop below her daughter’s small white desk, now the centerpiece of the family room, to gather up the tiny construction-paper piles that had …
Fiction Editor Michael Griffith: Natan Last’s Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle, just out from Pantheon, is a brilliant, exuberant, witty book that hopscotches from the initial crossword craze of the 1920s to the present. Along the way Last profiles innovators, traces the puzzle’s complicated evolution, explores the ways …
Guest Literary Nonfiction Editor David Lazar: Allison Field Bell’s “Body Essay” is, indeed, greater than the sum of its parts. This self-forensic, tonally muted work, is a Cartesian revision: We are corporeal, and therefore think about how every inch of us, each discrete part, conjoins body memory along with the memory of our bodies’ pleasures and …