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Fiction

Saint

Once when I was seven, I locked myself in the bathroom because my brother was threatening to tie a firecracker to each of my wrists and explode me like a melon. It was my cousin Henry who knocked on the door and coaxed me out with a dollar bill. Look, he said, crumpling the bill in his fist. Now close your eyes. My mother always told me not to shut my eyes around a boy, not even my own cousins and uncles and especially not my grandfather, who once impregnated thirty girls and a herd of goats in …

Poetry

Tie Dye

The bottle tips downwardand dye purls horizontal. Before it hits the tableI remember how the elk falls: blood runs across shoulder,vision floods with blindness. Ink rips through skin andchildren begin to yell. The white cotton,bundled into nests, cannot be saved.The hoof still twitches. I remember crying, pleading,will we be red forever? The next morningour shirts are strung up in a line, shot from long distance. Serena Deng is currently a junior in high …

In Process, Fiction

Pay Attention

This was August in Paris, by the Luxembourg Gardens, in the 6th, not that the garçon at Bistro Le Jardin expected the girl to know this, or to know that August in Paris did not properly belong to lovers and roses but to vagrants and pimps, blown plastic bags in the trees and the stench of rotting apple peels, out of season. He’d seen her come in yesterday with the famous painter, who probably did not expect to find his usual garçon aproned and ill-humored in the pit of summer. The girl – for she …

In Process, Poetry

How Could You Have Loved God in Heaven

Grandmother in the books I read I knowYou never had the     chance to read the books I readbut in the books I readThe theologians argue     we sleep betweendeath and the new     life on the new Earth we don’t go to HeavenNo singing hymns foreverYou sleep     and you won’t wakeConfused your strength     will come back you won’t chokeBecause you have forgotten how to swallow grand-mother rememberyou were hungryMy mother     even as …

Poetry

The Absent

or 0, emptinesslike the stars in the distance—placeholder the other side or 0, the shell of the circlewashed onto the sandwho plays no ocean songwhen conjoined to the ear or 0, the ring without it’sfinger, waiting to be filledwith the act—matrimony or 0, the racetrackwhere decisions orbitthe cavern, the centerpieceof grass like kidsspinning dreidels or 0, the glue,the seamstress of the industrial,and .com boom—we crowd around you,spell out our lonelinessin google search bars …

Nonfiction

Dylan Dog

The card I got for his birthday looks like a scene from a comic book—an illustration of a prehistoric man kneeling in front of a fire pit. I found this old photo of you discovering fire, the caption says. I spent too long picking the card, trying not to wonder what my friend would think, if I messaged her for advice on a birthday card for a guy who calls me his mistress. Comparing him to a prehistoric man seems appropriate; I always make fun of his age. Abuse, he cries out when I do. …