***My goldfinch, I’ll throw back my head—let’s look at the world together:A winter’s day, prickly as chaff,isn’t it hard on your eyes? —from The Voronezh Notebooks by Osip Mandelstam, translated by Margaree Little, Volume 66 issue 3 (Fall 2025) Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.One of the first . . .
Read More
OUR BARRIO SITS on the borders between Bukidnon province and Cagayan de Oro city, a half-forgotten hinterland. Cross the last sitio’s bridge, and you’ve left the city behind. Bukidnon’s roads are the end of asphalt dreams, where concrete gives way to earth: a bumpy quagmire in the season of rains, a dusty . . .
Read More
some dusks I linger long enoughto watch bats stream from the eaves of my neighbor’s houselike blood starved ofoxygen I could cut my ownumbilical cord to the world to watch theindigo sky leak out and believe I was thesource. I’m sorry. I’m sorry —from Brian Russell’s “Missouri,” Vol 66, issue 3 (Fall . . .
Read More
My Dear D, after twelve years of trying, I no longer hope you’ll remember we were once two peanuts nestled in the same shell.—from “What Peanuts Remember,” Vol 66 Issue 3 (Fall 2025) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.My first creative writing piece was this fiction about a . . .
Read More
and know: the clouds don’t know about the rain,and the water doesn’t know about the leavesfrom which it beats the music, rhythms, language —from Arno Bohlmeijer’s translation of “Become,” by Esther Jansma, Vol 66 Issue 3 (Fall 2025) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.“The Intruder,” Encounter Magazine, UK . . .
Read More
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 . . .
Read More
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 . . .
Read More
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 . . .
Read More
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 . . .
Read More
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 . . .
Read More