The Sound of Emily
Drained long ago, the gray pit fills with layer upon layer of soggy leaves, twigs, plastic bags, pop cans. Leading into that abyss is a fiberglass slide, emerging now like a ghost in the low morning light, taunting him with its unfaded aquamarine, its phony tropicality. From the window, it’s …
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Sea Change
After slumping into their late twenties, the girls only ever got together for wedding and baby-related events. Their fiancés and husbands and soon-to-be-children gave them perfect cause to reunite and celebrate. It was good to catch up, but more than that, they reveled in slipping back into younger and freer …
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There Is a Border Inside My Autumnal Mind
Many times, when I meet white intellectuals online or in person, They want to speak Spanish to me or take a shot of tequila. No, I’m not ashamed of Spanish, no soy menso, however, I wouldn’t say I grew up speaking Spanish first to strangers. Assimilation? Perhaps. But as a …
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Unreadable
Sometimes I misremember and I am the one looking out the clinic window when the SUV rips through a red light and hits the drunk just as he sprints into the street, flinging him up and over like he is made only of his soaked clothing. But the truth is, …
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On The Fact That A Heart Is The Size Of A Fist
My mother is a hand. Take that how you will. // I don’t know how to describe my father other than to say I don’t deserve him. // Growing up, I was my mother’s hand as a fist. // I was a single finger pointing at everyone else while three …
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Grayout of Ada Lovelace’s New York Times Obituary by Claire Cain Miller
. “That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show.” . …
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How Mothers Begin Lineages
. For my mother & grandmother After the prayer, a thousand rivers erupt. Mothers name each river an epistemology derivation from the name of their child. When a …
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But You Didn’t
Was it terrible? That time in the tiny market across from St. Bartholomew’s, where kids would stop before school for Tastykake pies and licorice, the morning when you and Nick Cane, rushing into the store just minutes before the bell rang, found the owner stretched out on the floor behind …
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Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief
In Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, a collection of 30 letters, Victoria Chang writes about intergenerational memory, silence, grief, racism, and death. Extending an approach featured in her poetry collection, OBIT (2020), she writes to both the living and the dead, as well as to concepts such …
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Summer of ’76
I love Ali MacGraw. I love her hair in the movie Love Story. Ma doesn’t. She accosts us―my friends and me―as we emerge from the theater that screens English movies. I’m in a celluloid trance as she grips my arm with her work-worn fingers and drags me home, where she …
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