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Head Trips
Puppet outside a gift shop, Oaxaca. 16:9clue via Flickr.,> Every morning my toddler wants to go upstairs to our guest room, to stare up at shelves of books interspersed with a few cherished items:...
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Cooking Backwards
Maybe it’s the recipe’s “lukewarm scalded milk” that spills on the bottom corner of the page. Fountain pen ink swims up to meet it, ghosting the words below. No matter. Mary made her Easter Bread and...
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Found in Situ
Still of Hylas and Heracles (Christopher Harris and Simon Turner, Sydney Dance Company) from Mythologia, by Jeff Busby I. I am standing in a grave, straddling a body of bones found in situ. I am not...
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The Informants
Terrance Roberts and two anti-gang outreach workers, Bryan Butler and John “Qwest” Lewis, outside the Prodigal Son office. Tragedy has haunted the Holly from its earliest days. In 1960, the...
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May You Live Long Enough to Become the Standard of Beauty
Illustration by Erin Perfect. Age Six In the Nollywood movie Goodbye Tomorrow, a woman is dying in a hospital. Her sores are bubbling with maggots. Her wounds ooze something yellow and gooey. The...
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Shock Therapy
Photo by Jakub Pabis on Unsplash Compared to the South Korean or Brazilian landfills I saw in my brother’s Newsweek, the municipal dump of my Silesian hometown looked small, hemmed in by a forest of...
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There Is No Metaphor Here
Photo by David Clode on Unsplash The first time I heard your heartbeat, you were a green grape. You’d already been a poppy seed, a lentil, a blueberry, a kidney bean. The technician pressed a monitor...
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Grief Is Another Word For Love
Illustration by Anne Le Guern. I am trapped in Australia. The borders are shut, which has worked well for keeping COVID-19 out, but it has also kept me in. Over the last fifteen months in sunny Perth,...
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Scorched
Photo by Gigi on Unsplash Instructions Choose the best word by reading the passages below to fill in the blanks and locate the young boy’s missing tongue. This word, often associated with Tauruses, is...
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In a World Without Sushi
Images: Luigi Pozzoli and Brandon on Unsplash Salmon is the most popular fish on American plates, and in sushi restaurants around the world. As the owner of Sushiville in Portland, Oregon, my father...
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Cavity
Image via Rijksmuseum: Vissen in een aquarium, Gerrit Willem Dijsselhof, 1876 - 1924. The saltwater aquarium in my new dentist’s office is its best feature. My favorite fish is a red fish with big...
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Roots of Memory
Marilyn’s Grove in Prospect Park. Photographer: Kris Graves This story is a part of “Memory Loss,” a series co-published with Urban Omnibus. Just inside the north entrance of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park...
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Out to Sea
The skeleton of a whale, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. One morning in the spring of 2019 a beluga whale swam up beside a red fishing boat off the far north coast of Norway....
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Mycelium
Photo by Jesse Dodds on Unsplash It starts on August seventh, the day I have a black eye because you threw my phone backwards over your head and my eye was right there. I couldn’t speak for an hour,...
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The Edge of Bethlehem
Detail of textile fragment, anonymous, 1661 - 1673, via Rijkmuseum Rebbe, did you know that I ran in yeshiva? Most nights, when seder ended, I’d return my Talmud to my makom in the beit midrash,...
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Life or Siege?
Photo by Bryan Goff on Unsplash Siege / noun A military operation in which enemy forces surround a town or building, cutting off essential supplies, with the aim of compelling those inside to...
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Dear Achiro
Photo by Mason B. on Unsplash DREAMing Out Loud: Voices of Migrant Writers, is a PEN America workshop series for young undocumented and migrant writers. This week we excerpt an anthology of their...
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Portrait of the Mother as an Artist
Interior view of Empress, part of Niki de Saint Phalle's Tarot Garden, in Garavicchio, Italy. Photo: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra, via flickr. In Niki de Saint Phalle’s first major American exhibition, “Niki...
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A Garden in the Desert
Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash The summer desert prickled with the anticipation of rain. Inside the living room, the dog slept like a comma on the rug. Afternoon sun forced its way through the...
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What Runs Beneath
Herders near Lake Turkana. Photo by Robin Hutton via Flickr. At dawn, there had been only desert, scrub, a few thorn trees. But as the sky blued, dozens of goats and cows crested a sand dune,...
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