The people now inhabit the crowns. There is, in fact, little space up there, but no one turns off your water or comes by with the leaf blower or raises your rent out of the blue. Up …

A hair fell from her head. It fell and fell and I followed it with my gaze. It landed in one of the trays that sat on a scale. It threw the scale out of balance. The scale tilted. It …

As in some demented romantic comedy, my wife and I divided the apartment in half. She took the living room and I took the bedroom. Bivouacked and bleeding, we waited for the lawyer to finish the …

A frog jumped out of the broom closet; the wife was already screaming; and the husband burst into the kitchen, squeezed the trigger of his face. In the time it took the morning light to stream …

“Though there is ordinarily no language for pain,” Elaine Scarry writes in the introduction of The Body in Pain , “under the pressure of the desire to eliminate pain, an at least fragmentary means of verbalization is available both to those who are themselves in pain and to those who wish to speak on behalf of others”.…

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  …