After Jennifer S. Cheng 1: the sea captured in a glass 2: a homophone for having enough for leftovers, a synonym for abundance 3: the fish, who have already forgotten you. It’s not personal 4: where memory fails, there’s still imagining 5: you. Not as an ocean but outside 6: glass and/or acrylic
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The Arrest, in all its surreal narrative trappings, supercars, and Hollywood theatrics, wants to know if words can save us in a dystopia.
Winner of the EXTINCTION Essay Contest, selected by Lacy M. Johnson
CHARLES YU is the author of three books, including the novel How to
(*fourteen unverified claims) Ghost Dads exist, believe you me. Fathers, living and no longer, conjure equivalent quality spirits. Their shadows extend indefinitely across villages, shires, and provinces. Across the block. Across the
Our first date is at an Italian restaurant in the Upper East Side with fake brick walls. The waiter sits us down and says, “Welcome to the old country.” The fake walls
Up yonder, the sky yawns openwide in a downpour. I suck greedy on the silken stem of one last God-white honeysuckle blossom & I watch the rain close in. The hot aircrackles
* * * * * * * * * * Each morning before breakfast my grandfather walked to the edge of the yard to raise the flag, to fly its colors near the heavens. My job was to hold the hard pack of
Accumulated through the season, like black exhauston white snow, winter cruelties linger—a dirtyepidermal merengue sealing in all that wouldotherwise melt within us; the closing of the bellowsthat precedes the closing case. We
When I wear sunglasses all day, I forget what the world actually looks like There is a pool with an ocean view. Chlorine mixes with beachmusk and sunblock and hotdogs.Metal grating digs
the newspaper boy once told melove is loud. scream three times each day, and someone will at least feed you: sugar-snap peas thrown, showeringlike hail, macadamia nutsscattered like words, even safflower seeds sprinkling the nest of
To think there is such a thingas a good dayis to neglect the sun’s eternal indifferenceto the clouds and fogthat bottle it up invisibleand block its raysfrom reaching our foreheads. What kindof
(Where neither photography nor sketching were allowed) I. The freighted thud of a rock hitting an ice sheeted pond. No crack. White shavings lay in the sundry mud and leaves thrown off
All things considered, it is a comedy about fruit. People travel from miles around to buy produce from the stand on the side of the highway. They get out