Evelina looked for peace and quiet. To find it, she woke up before everybody else: before her father who had to get to the fields an at early hour, before her mother and grandmother who had chores to do, before her older siblings who went to school, and before the younger ones . . .
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“‘C’mon, ladies. It’s not fun for me either,’ Marina called. ‘Bend over and touch your toes.’ The wet nurses complied, their rumps rising up in a line of mottled curved. The lights weighed on them, all nude except for cotton underwear.”—from, “The Milkmaid,” Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022) Tell us about . . .
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It could happen. Once it happens.Earlier, later. Closer todaybut not to you. You’ll survive because you ran, because you hid.Because you were first. Because last.Because alone. Because the others.—from “Mass Shootings Are Actually Pretty Rare, But Here’s What to Do If You’re Ever in One,” Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022) What . . .
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“It is the usual disposition of corners, to be polyvocal, and so, between the voices of future morbidities and past registers, I contribute my current grammar to the orchestra of echoes.”—from “In This Small Place,” Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.I must . . .
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You’re dead for so long and young just a little. So why notkiss if there’s kissing on offer? There isn’t much timeto be beautiful, and even less to know it. Even now,you are losing your poreless luster.—from “Middle-Aged Sonnet,” Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022) Tell us about one of the first . . .
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I found a pensión in the Barri Gòtic, not far from La Rambla. An old woman with a limp welcomed me and took my money and showed me to my room. I seem to remember that one of her shoes had a thick heel and sole (to compensate for, I suppose, an . . .
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“Not just what I feel but what I knowAnd how I know it, my unscholarliness,My rawness, all rise out of the cobbledLandscape I was born to.Those of you raised similarly,I want to say: this is nota detriment and it is not a benefit…”—from “My Education,” Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022) Tell . . .
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A few years ago, I placed my younger self into a poem dreaming of a potato-chip-flavored kiss. All-American kisses occured in lives where candy bars andsleeping with your hair wet were also permitted, where the attention of Americanmothers cast soft glowe through the house and clicked off at night.—from “Ars Poetica,” Volume . . .
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The living room is crowned by a painting, one that has no purpose other than to take precedence over the armchairs. In the scene there are two deer, grazing on a sparse, dry plain: everything is yellow, from the animals to the meadow to a shadeless sky at high noon. There is . . .
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If I write myself into a state, does that make the state false? In the background of one of the many pictures I take of Patrycja by the feeding ring,two of the horses bit each other. Without violence, how do I understand my life as meaningful?—from “Eastern Washington Diptych,” Volume . . .
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