I don’t want to go to the mosque only women may walk around in gold and silk ustad says when he caresses my ears my Arabic teacher calls me his gazelle
Majnun loves his Layla like a man possessed his love burns hearts glasses and plates...
I write to the learned Sufi the rabbi the imam and the shaman on WhatsApp whom I now have to pay my dowry...
A strong wind breaks a tree branch by the roadside. The branch trips up an electric bike. Its food delivery box tumbles to the ground. A rental bike bumps against it, tips over. The two riders fall …
Writer, editor, educator, and collaborator Tisa Bryant does not merely write across genres; she stretches them, the boundaries between memoir, criticism, and theory pulled taut until they give way to …
Any work of erasure constitutes, by definition, certain frictions: a negotiation of authority; a wrestling with the vicissitudes of technique; and an unavoidable contretemps with the overtly …
There are only five things Molly would miss if she killed herself. She would miss her vape. She’d miss the taste of its hazelnut coffee-like pulls and the exhaled clouds that take up more space in …
Here in Westerville, the City Services Department handled weed complaints from picky residents who value beautiful lawns. For a modest fee, crews would pick up well-sorted yard waste three times per …
At night, my friend, awake in bed, takes yet another hard candy from the box, heedless of its taste, and after unwrapping it, throws the wrapper on the floor where it will remain for a million years. …
The World is ending. In twenty-six minutes the servers that sustained the World for almost thirty years, housed in datacenters strewn across three continents, will emit their death rattles. Players …
The woman walks away from the car. Her husband in the driver’s seat and the children in the back seat sleep, dreaming of summer storms. We watch her from our car in complete silence, pondering. …
Before I learned about war, loss, or cruelty, I learned about joy from a boy named Ahmed. My great aunt’s neighbor couldn’t speak yet, but I enjoyed spending time with him. He was quiet, and I …
Here are the coordinates: 37°33'28.2"N 24°57'39.3"E Yesterday, I left for the island, and I’m wondering if, three years ago, you took the very same flight. There was 20% off for today only, …
Imagine: you are a nonbinary cowboy in small-town America, and your lover has just left you. There’s nothing between you, your loneliness, and the beckoning desert. What do you do to soothe the …
It is rare that a publisher receives a manuscript that causes a somatic response, a verge of tinge and contracture, emitting saffron light, smooth to the touch, waxy like soft-bodied …
Samyak Shertok’s debut collection, No Rhododendron, was selected by Kimiko Hahn as the winner of the 2025 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. The collection itself feels like a circular strand of …
A few days after my grandma was formally diagnosed with ALS, she wheeled into an appointment with her neurologist – a man who had ignored her requests for ALS testing for over a year – with a …
Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir Reading the Waves is a literary exploration of memory and the transformative power of storytelling. In a book she describes as “not a memoir,” but “a space of …
I converted to Catholicism earlier this year, though I dislike calling myself a Catholic convert. The phrase suggests conservative politicians like J.D. Vance, who wield Catholicism to achieve harsh …
At the movie theater that had become a college for kids said to be special they took a math class with a man who was frustrated with the amount of paper being balled up and tossed in the air around …