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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Marissa Davis‘ poetry collection End of Empire arrived back in July 2025 from Penguin. Both her translation work and her own poetry have appeared in MR‘s pages, in MR 62.2 and 65.3, respectively. Cynthia White‘s collection, Glossogenesis, is out from Sundress Publications and their e-chap series. White’s poem “Footpad” came out in . . .
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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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This piece first appeared on African Feminism. As people living at the intersection of multiple oppressions, legacies of slavery and colonialism, and neocolonial capture of our nations, we must remain extremely vigilant for erasure and appropriation of our voice and agency. African feminisms cannot exist in spaces where struggles of other colonized . . .
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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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