by Lyn Di Iorio After the first time, Maritza kept killing Rock Rogan so often and with such gusto that she ended up bringing him back to life. She bashed his head in again that morning with her baseball bat. Carack, carack, cerrrackack. His by-now shriveled brains shifted with a sibilant sound, like a sigh… [Read More]

by Julija Šukys It’s 2017. At the University of Texas, I admire the Tower’s smooth sides with bas-relief figures carved down its arched front. The flag flies at half-mast, but I don’t know why. I find the Tower beautiful. Not everyone agrees with my assessment: some scholars have called it a mongrel and a hybrid. No… [Read More]

by Theresa Lin In December 2012, the incidents surrounding my father’s eventual arrest made the front page of The New York Times. The federal government had conducted the largest crackdown on Chinese immigration since the 1980s and indicted 26 individuals, including eight attorneys, one of whom was my father. It was revealed that my father… [Read More]

by Jen Grow “What seems to be happening at the moment,” writes mindfulness teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn, “is never the full story of what is really going on.” I considered these words as I hiked an unfamiliar section of the Appalachian Trail with no idea how long it would take me to find a campsite. My… [Read More]

by Ellen Goldstein “Take Deneb,” my father said, pointing the flashlight into the night sky. My mother and I were quiet, listening to my father’s voice rise above the pop and crackle of the campfire. Having a fire outside was my favorite thing. I was ten, and we had eaten all the marshmallows. “Deneb is… [Read More]

by Libby Kalmbach Clark The most obvious thing one can say about international borders, although not therefore an uninteresting thing, is that they are fictional. I was born in Northern Michigan, around 70 miles as the crow flies from the border that divides Lake Superior between the United States and Canada. If I were to… [Read More]

by Derek Maiolo He told me to choose Honeycrisp or Fuji, the firm kind that could handle some wounding. Use whatever is sharp and nearby — a screwdriver or ballpoint pen — and pierce carefully, first through the stem and then the side, until both are tunnels that meet at the core. I watched his… [Read More]

by Reiner Heidorn Full view of “Europa 1945-1970” Growing up amid Germany’s layered history, I am formed by memory, guilt, and responsibility. My work interrogates how national narratives are taught, remembered, and contested—how the past persists in the present through images, spaces, and speech. Several map paintings as featured in Heidorn’s studio. The school maps’ erased… [Read More]

by John A. Nieves Not just my fingers, but my whole hand made this: the curve of my palm, the base of my wrist. Here is how a hand bends light. Here is how it words. Your fingers stretch to shadow the wall. Here is where you pressed a bruise once. Here, below your fingers,… [Read More]

by Cynthia Clifford Is anything forbidden? The X-rated aisle, the top of Mount Everest, monkeys as pets? Well, there aren’t video rental stores anymore except in Bend, Oregon. But there are eggs past the expiration date in the back of the fridge. Made you look, or at least, think about looking. All eggs float on… [Read More]

by Eric Pankey Around me, a little solitude. As in a Persian miniature, Perspectival hierarchies flatten out Into the map of a garden From which I can only be expelled. I long to fly, but forget How thin the air gets up there. There at the threshold of dusk: The smell of rain before it… [Read More]

by Sophie Klahr Remember the bats who died of too muchinterrupted sleep?  Human-borne disease  kept them up at night: the troubled breathing,a mouth that itched. Enough, my mother said, when yet another story of my grieffor one animal or another took over the kitchen—she was just tryingto sit and read the newspaper. She’d read aloud… [Read More]