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 …
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 …
Maybe a skylight above this hospital bed? I could watch the moonrise and wish I did more of that sort of passive reckoning with the three kids, arriving mutually at our sacred nothingness. We’re always going, one thing to the next, mincing hours into minutes, minutes into seconds; if I sketched the effect, it’d be …
I I saw only a glimpse of you that night. I woke, possibly frightened by a dream or the sound of unfamiliar footsteps on the other side of my bedroom door. I peered out. You, a six-foot-two dad who lifted weights and kept a stack of Muscle Builder magazines by the TV, were wearing what …
My mother’s village is about an hour’s drive south from Beirut. The route starts on the coast, the sea to the right, vast, blue, and sparkling in the sun. Beyond the army checkpoint in Sidon, smaller roads east and farther south wind through busy villages lined by short concrete buildings with storefronts on the ground …
Story from Issue 22.1
The train curved around the mountains of West Virginia, and my father said to look out the window. He pointed to our right, and I saw the engine. Then he pointed to his left, and I saw the red caboose. “We’re one big circle,” he said. “I don’t know if we’re coming or going. If …
1 Pears fall to the yard, green bombs hitting green earth with a thud. Under the pear tree I read, journal, dance. I pet my calico cat, Rosie, and wave nets in the air attempting to catch butterflies. Down the hill from the pear tree are black raspberry bushes, empty of leaves and color in …
Although I have now lived inside the ivory tower for longer than I ever lived outside it, my arrival first felt like exile. That immigration seems like a far more dramatic passage than my journey from South Korea as an infant adoptee, though certainly the latter has inspired more curiosity. But I have no memory …
I remember the summer after Chernobyl for its fertility and vibrant colors. Whether it was due to the high levels of radiation blown toward the Crimean Peninsula by the northern winds, as my family speculated later, or to my grandfather’s tireless efforts to turn a cleared patch of clay into a kitchen-garden, that year our …