Depending on the situation and people involved, this outside world may or may not crash like terse waves into said Self, transgressing a felt sense of sovereignty, wholeness, intactness, a concept which is intangible yet real . . . very real.
Sarah Chin’s story navigates the sticky terrain of grief.
An ekphrastic prose poem that makes the artifact embodied through a narrative.
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 …
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 …
Alice and her father’s second wife are going to the museum. When the second wife stoops to kiss Alice’s little brothers goodbye, Alice can see all the way up her skirt. They are going to the museum so that Alice’s dad can get some quiet time. All morning, he’s made hushed phone calls in the …
It was across the street, at the bottom of the hill our own house crowned, so she got all our rain whenever it rained. All the neighborhood’s rain, it seemed. It ran down the eaves, down the driveways, down the old pebble road in dozens of little gray rivers, along the cracks and plow scars, …
I found it on the subway platform at 116th Street. A piece of paper torn from another, larger piece of paper. There were items scrawled on it, numbered one through seven. The scrap was resting on the ledge, about to topple down to the rats. To that other zone, where The City’s waxy smut cakes …
I remember feeling a restlessness in my twenties and moving quite often, not always to different cities or parts of the country, sometimes just to different apartments within the same city. Usually there was a reason for moving—grad school, a job opportunity, a relationship—but not always. Sometimes it was just the sense that I was …
