My friend Claire said that her daddy once told her that if you took all of the lies humans had told since the beginning of time and set them up in the sky, the sky would become the lies because …

When I sat down, we shot the shit about this and that for a minute, but I knew there was something on Pablo’s mind. So, after he started his second drink while going on about how students always …

Looking to spend a few minutes not sad, I traveled to South Florida with my husband Steve, my sister Colleen, and her husband John. One morning, early in the trip, I stood at the counter in the …

He’d drive us out into the desert and we’d hike through that dirt and brush, rocks wrapped by lichen, until he’d say, This is good. Then we’d shoot coyotes. Shoot them all day. Smoke her, …

I’ve known abandonment because I’ve known and loved the image. The image abandons, abandons by its nature, like nature abandons. If I say, the body is a stone, I have abandoned the body. If I …

After Charles Wright I can’t describe the photograph with the clarity of the photograph.  That is the anxiety of the image. I can’t describe the groan in my head without imbuing it with a sense …

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 …

“Well if you leave out his personal life, he was a happy man.” —Lynn Brown Jr., business associate of Wallace Stevens It is, of course, old Wallace Stevens, austere as a cow in autumn, …

In what may have been our last week, we went down to the late afternoon meadow, and stood at the high blueberry bushes,

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 …