The suitcase no one packs lives in the back of the closet in a shroud of wedding boots and radio sweaters, its hinges glued with labels from razed hotels. It holds textiles, tax stamps, a great-great-grandmother’s long shadow, the name of the uncle who worked the tobacconist’s shop. It holds recipes for sorrel and sour […]
the girl found the fairies in the crawlspace below her house where slants of light illuminated how they fluttered about and spun webs strong enough to snare mice she stared, fascinated, for a while almost forgetting about the wrathful thunder of mother’s footsteps above the fairies needed no web to snare the girl she started […]
The Greeks believed that a human being is one entity unseamed at the spine, opened at the breastbone, parted at the lips, which is why we spend all our lives pressing together at the hips, at the fingertips; our tongues locked like doors. Which is why we’re always shouting at strangers, asking, “Are you the […]
You could go to school with the sea You might pass it in the hall. Maybe it asks you out. Maybe a movie or a dance—the waves curling about your ankles People looking at you weird But the water is warm and the salt spray tastes […]
The Holy Barons rumble through the untended slum-gardens against the highway and drop payloads. If the halo-copters hear you scream from downstairs, you get one from on high, and it makes a whistle on the way down and falls against your prayers— it goes through one girl’s bedroom ceiling and suddenly her college first-pick knows […]
it starts with their garden: it’s a square where sunflowers and cilantro dominate most of the landscape, but the yellow isn’t our yellow and the smell of herbs isn’t the scent of ceviche; red roses and white lilies border balconies, bees busy with mechanical wings; they sit on petals, florae skin that doesn’t bend with […]
Brecht, singing in the dark times while our greater Mahagonny floods and burns, you made Blitzstein a better muse than me, tired of invisible walls and strings pulled in plain sight and expecting no mounted messengers, even ironic ones. Let me talk to Hauptmann who knew the differences between owning a play and robbing one, […]
Like all monsters, we don’t belong, but our problem is time and not space. We got here too early. We have always had this sense of wrongful, unseemly arrival. We arrived before community, before there was language to describe us, before the “Other” box on the census, before the war. We are the hiss in […]
Prologue We grew inside our mother. She whispered to us, “You are mine, mine.” Not knowing better, we agreed. Beside her skin’s luminous husk, we were foam-feelings, limbs creased like clouds, permeable blobs. We stayed on hold slowly expanding, surging slippery like similes. (i) We imagined our mother’s unhurried beauty: dark and large with a […]