“Sometimes there’s nothing you can do,” my mom consoles her friend, upset about her son. Both women quit smoking, but we’ve all seen how a lit cigarette can catch like a lost fishhook hungry for flesh. Most wildfires ignite from human oversight, but you can’t blame the mother. In his garage my cousin playing with …
The Museum of Mothers is free on Fridays.I go with Rheim, who is also not a mother, though she carries around a bag of needlesshe bought years ago from an Iraqi woman everyone called Zahra. Rheim gave namesto each of their lean metallic bodies. We start in the sculpture garden, which the curatorshave named Sorry …
(To use the PDF embedder to see both pages of the poem, use the arrows on the bottom left-hand side.) Text: Among the early arrivals / the island Pulau Bidong / before us / uninhabited / archipelago / night float downriver / spilling into a sea storm / in the overheated engine an explosion / …
a golden shovel / after Against Me! All I ever wanted to be—the summerdaydreamed of. Girl in the floral-print dress& endless golden fields. I just wanted youto future me, when so many people wantme past-tensed. I know I can’t convince themI deserve survival. A future togrow up into. I know that they can’t seea girl’s …
stares down head and claw on the tableto make something whole again. Perhaps she’s unnerved by the prospect, deathback to life. But that we crave not just intact but true is the first wish as whenan old mount from the ’30s is taken out of the standard formal pose-of-that-day, itsupright-for-eternity habit of ninety years, its …
1 Teh-chang came home a couple of days after the surgery, wheeled out of the hospital with a cotton bandage wrapped around his head cartoon-style and, even stranger-looking, a white mesh Styrofoam netting gathered into a point on top of that, which made him resemble a delicate fruit packaged for long-distance transportation. He had survived …
On Christmas we wake up Puerto Rican. That’s when our grandmother stops pretending that hers is our only blood and lets our grandfather’s bleed back in. She stands at the feet of our beds and pulls on our blanketed toes. “Wake up, you two,” she says, holding up an album cover. “Merry Christmas.” All year …
At dinner that night, Lo chops off her boyfriend’s head. He’s explaining again, holding forth about how she just has a better eye for cleaning than he does, it’s a compliment to her that she even notices when something’s out of place, he wishes he could be as detail oriented as her—and she slinks into …
1 Get a job at the local bowling alley when your mom starts drinking again. Take whatever position they are willing to give you. You will be fifteen years old with no experience, three-fifths of a mustache, and the charisma of a dried pickle, so your only offer’ll be to man concessions for what you …
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