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Teaching Poetry in the Palestinian Apocalypse
Photo by DYKT Mohigan via Flickr. Someday, with my hands I will transform the image. Samih Al-Qasim, “I, The Pronoun of the Speaker” I gave my first lecture, at my first academic job, behind a wall of...
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“She Ain’t Gonna Last Very Long, Is She?”
Photo: Old Kentucky State Capitol, by Brent Moore via Flickr When I was twenty-three and fresh out of college — your typical apple-cheeked, idealistic idiot — I got my first job, working for the...
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Taking Flight
Photo by Vincentiu Solomon on Unsplash A person, being of cosmic origin, can become one with a star. — Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, A Treatise on Stars Every day I see a hawk. Except recently I learned that...
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Slag
Photo by Josh Sorenson on Unsplash I met Henry during a Russian film studies class. We sat in silence, the screen flickering white and grey and blue. We fit together. Henry had grown up on the water....
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Shark’s Eye
From the "Fish from American Waters" series, for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes Brands, 1889. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Jefferson R. Burdick Collection, Gift of Jefferson R. Burdick. On...
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Raising a Stink
A samurai in a latrine; outside, his three attendants hold their noses. Coloured woodcut by Hokusai, 1834, via Wellcome Collection. At some time during the Tokugawa period in Japan, the magistrates in...
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Itasca, Alight
Illustration by Anne le Guern In the spring of 1995, ecologist Becky Marty, still a new hire at Itasca State Park in northern Minnesota, lit Preachers Grove on fire. It was a bold decision, choosing a...
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Recent Memory
Lana Bastašić’s debut novel, Catch the Rabbit, opens with an arresting first-person voice—a narrator called Sara half addressing, half writing about her childhood friend Lejla, who phones her in...
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Love and Dirt
Illustration by Anne le Guern It saddens me to say it, but after years of seeking to come to terms with my own inadequacy, not saying it feels worse: I am, truly and perhaps incurably, messy. I’ve...
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Blood, Sweat, Turmeric
Illustration by Anne le Guern My very first period came to me like a stranger on a train. My parents and I were taking an overnight sleeper from Delhi to Bombay to visit my paternal grandmother....
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At the Bath House
Illustration by Anne le Guern Before there was love, before lovers and children born out of wedlock, before we knew the names of things, there were the bath houses of my childhood. The bath house was...
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Thinking About Toilets
Illustration by Anne le Guern As India tries to breathe, as her people — my people — alternate between different forms of grief, as her far-flung children attempt to assuage guilt with donations that...
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Hosts
“The Most Popular Agent” / Drs. Starkey & Palen, via Wellcome Collection When did I become the kind of person who walks a mile along the highway at midnight to meet a stranger at a motel? This is...
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Suzanne Takes You Down to Her Place Near the River
Suzanne Verdal in an undated photo. Image provided by Suzanne Verdal. You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night beside her And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be...
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Famished
Illustration by Akshaya Zachariah Mridula Chari’s “Famished,” reprinted here, traces the history of hunger in India from a famine in 1876 to escalating food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic....
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Boys Will Be
Photo by Baptiste MG on Unsplash At first, the boys were one — a shapeless mass of shuffling gray-green, flickers of muscle here and there, like the life inside a lake. I squinted at the video on my...
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Steven Returns the Universe
The author’s uncle Steven. Photo courtesy of the author. Content warning: This piece discusses suicide; if you or someone you know is considering suicide, please visit the National Suicide Prevention...
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How to Inhabit the Word
Spring Smell, Friedel Dzubas, via WikiArt. Wet earth. Loam. Bitter ash, brine on the wind. The unfurling of cedar, a smell that takes me out of this place and back to bathtubs in Japan; a portal of a...
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Kate Braverman Is Dead
Photo: mqnr via Flickr I. In the photo I find, taken around 1977, Kate Braverman’s Los Angeles is painted in opaque shades of blue, her color of possibility. Not quite sapphire — a particularly...
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Whatever the Weather
Photo by JD Designs on Unsplash The weather in my hometown is easy. Fairhope wags on the tail of Alabama, where the brackish waters of Mobile Bay tame briny gusts off the Gulf of Mexico. Humidity is a...
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