Amy Powell moderates a conversation between Zinab Sedira and Ranjana Khanna regarding "the subtle persistence of struggles over nationhood, asylum, cultural identity, and language" in Sedira's …
I know you know how to sing but who taught you This poem are from Joe Wenderoth’s fourth book of poems, If I Don’t Breathe How Do I Sleep , which is forthcoming …
I've been lucky—March is over / and my son is still alive. My daughter / is about to crawl. And the golden / sunset light recalls easy bygone feelings. / I feed my son while he sleeps / through a …
scientists in Hong-Kong have discovered a prehistoric fish / washed ashore in my bathtub among hair knots & soap suds / National Geographic is on its way / this creature with ten eyes & no fins / …
If you ask for a god, / I will give you a hum-drum sculpture, a cheap / vessel to fill / with what you think / is worthy: your angst / and cum, that one memory / of your mother / when she was still …
In the water left from the waitress' rag, I made James' face: pinched salt for the scar below the eyebrow, a fleck of pepper for a freckle, bent straw for the bridge of the nose. The trouble with my …
stands in a bubble in the backyard. The bubble is large, and so only looks / like an oily wall. His whole life / behind this one thin wall, and he presses his hand through. The wall feels like a …
After lunch, some poems. Wild ember, / isn't it pleasant to sprawl on this grass
at my insistence, dropping the knife / for pushing the rice plugs into mud with,
/ eyes blue smears in …
In another time the choice / might have been depicted as two gates: Open the one, and it is winter. / Snow covers the cobbled pathways, the spires, / the December markets shrill / with lettuces. Snow …
I will never love you like I love Joe Strummer / she said and I said that’s / ok I won’t either / Our lips were there in the rearview mirror / and if you were in the backseat maybe it would have …
At this counter you can buy mints, M&Ms, slick magazines, and / a chance for the end of the / rainbow. It doesn't help to be / a sourpuss (I should know). / One automaton please in good operating …
Drunk again. You do the math. You wanted / happiness and I can't blame you for that. I wanted / to tell this story without having to confess / the water stains on the ceiling remind me / of shedding …
A distress / of ambulances / pass. / Snow like / diphtheria. / She called / love "lead / poisoning," / left by / the backdoor. / Like cake / in a casket, / she made mud / of my hospitality. / No one …
There will be a fire that blocks out the sun. For now, though, in the four—give it five— long seconds before, there's a dinner being eaten in the middle of the day. Good thing we're not robbers. …
Imagine: an afternoon desert. The wilderness at its horizon. Together we're crossing a well-traveled path. Our destination? A river about thirty miles east of Jerusalem's walls. Who do you want to …
I thought if I wrote about Rory maybe that would get him out of my dreams. I was renting a house—four months rent paid up, nothing to do but write—from a professor of Archeology away on a dig. …
She begins it. In August of 1914. Twenty-seven years old, she is, to most an old maid and has only recently returned to South Carolina to teach. Flowers, bones, and skies you enter like a room are …
Broom clean, the realtor had said. Don't give the buyer a reason to renege. Certainly not. Not after so many delays: the dickering over price, the demands for repairs before the closing date. One …
In September, Pritch and his wife decided he should be the one who quit work and stayed home with the baby. Pritch's wife made a lot more money and, besides, Pritch seemed like daddy material. So, on …
At the duty free just north of the Canadian border, Tim stood in line with a case of Labatt's under his arm. The Canadian kind tasted better, his dad always said, although Tim only pretended to tell …
A year after Sadie moved in with him, Ben brought home a buffalo calf in a rented trailer designed to carry four horses. The calf rode the thirty miles of highway from the farm in Buckeye, Arizona, …
We were out of touch with love. We're not cement men anymore we reminded one another, walking hand in hand. We rented a cabin to focus on love. We made lists of what love could be like and should be …
Tonight I'm almost asleep when the smells come. Intestinal pigs feet smells. She's cooking again, my grandmother, inside the little house. Abuela was a night person. She rises in the dark to stir her …
In November, all the women in Northwest Ohio have bats in their purses. They hang upside down within the purses, no matter the size, silent, peaceful, their tiny claws clinging to the cell phone …
Understandably, the ambitious man’s friend fled for protection to the one place where he figured he’d be safe, Corinth, and there he raised a son who grew up to have his own son—a boy who was …
All three of these stories echo Donald Barthelme’s brevity, concision, and wry intelligence, his gift for memorable one-liners. Notoriously withering as his critiques could be, he would have loved …
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. It seems like only yesterday that we were saying hello to you, announcing our grand plans for Gulf Coast. And here we are, two years and a few …
