Gimena recognized two things. One: her neighbors meant no real harm, that they were merely bored, and an element of drama, no matter how false, was too juicy to deny; and two: she would turn into an ugly, bitter, unrecognizable version of herself if she stayed amongst them. —from J. Nevada’s “What . . .
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Happy scenes made me perfectly bitter that autumn. The season dragged on instead of running its course, looping back in a closed curve. Instead of moving from spring to summer to autumn, it was autumn, autumn, and autumn again. Would winter ever arrive? —from “Autumn Heatwave” by Park Seon Woo, translated by . . .
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This essay was first prepared as a talk on caste, class, and race for the third annual Association of Postcolonial Thought symposium at UMass Amherst. As an ethnographer, I planned to draw on the work I have done in the city I have loved every day of my life, a place that . . .
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On Saturday two men came to slaughter the palm, whose exuberant pinnate leaves I had made a habit of watching each morning from my post inside the bedroom, head cocked on the pillow. My Observation of the palm’s swaying became a course in breathing, a crown of exemplary lungs to follow, learning . . .
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I was sorry to bother her. I was always sorry to lift my hand, make the fist, knock, knock. Always at the dinner hour, that’s when you caught them at home. But isn’t it odd—I never interrupted anyone’s dinner, not in all my years of knock, knock. People would come to the . . .
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Sometimes I think of my life as a big container with others stacked inside it, like one of those wooden Russian dolls they sell at Christmas. Chris—the smallest—insideNiagara Falls, insideMateo, insidemy film notebook, insidemy job at FALLOUT, the outer shell If only I could get down to the innermost container—the essential, most . . .
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It’s been reported: in Bucha,people are collecting bodies stuffedwith bullets, hands tied behind their backs.—from M. Cynthia Cheung’s “The Amount of Death and Pain in the City Was Extraordinary,” Volume 66, Issue 1 (Spring 2025) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.Around the time I began writing poetry, I . . .
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. . . THE PHOTOCOPIER.If called on to produce more than a dozen double-sided copies, it began to overheat, and on its worst days, Jeanie’s efforts ended in the abduction of one pristine sheet after another into the machine’s inscrutable bowels. There the paper was tightly accordioned, the copier’s companionable hum abruptly . . .
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Detective Varela calls it an interview room, but it looks an awful lot like the interrogation rooms in Law and Order. Over-airconditioned, scuffed floors, grubby walls, one-way mirror, rickety chair to keep you on edge. Paper coffee cups litter the tabletop. Goosebumps popping on your arms and legs, rubbing against your soft . . .
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I used to have a house full of sisters and a dress that smelled like oranges. I used to have a braid—from Caroline Harper New’s “Loom,” Volume 66, Issue 2 (Summer 2025) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.I wrote my first poem in 5th grade about a purple polka-dot . . .
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