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
you like guns. once your stepfather shot off his own finger with a gun. the newspapers called it a domestic dispute. your mother laughs about it. your mother has a tattoo of
Stepping through the back door, I squint against the shadows before sliding into the corner booth of the bar section. The restaurant’s near empty, the way I like it. Every few weeks,
I live a quiet life now. By “quiet,” I mean, in part, uneventful—depending on one’s definition of “event.” My husband says, “I never needed ‘exciting.’ I don’t need to get away from
Thursday – 8:15 A.M. ⠀ When the morning arrives, it comes with light sun showers and a dull pain that starts in the pit of your stomach and seems to wrap its
Even the father in this children’s cartoon is inadequate. Taking his kids to the pool, he doesn’t think to bring sunscreen, hats, towels, toys, snacks, not even water to drink—and, to think,
You shuck oysters, separate herbs from their stems, brush dirt and scrape the gills from mushrooms. You dice onions, slice garlic, shave fennel, and the tip of your nail on the blade
About a month ago I heard her in a dog’s bark. It was likely a Tuesday or Wednesday morning when I heard her voice in a dog’s bark. I locked the door
trying to keep it quiet I’m cramming in egg shells and potato peels emptying the fridge rolling out line after line of flag-print stamps ⠀ oh please keep it from shrieking at
feet slap dark moss soft webbed platypus plap plap plap bump on my eardrum tap tap tap cave-wall lit like a microphone my amoeba legs flow in and out lightly on
Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless like water.Now, you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup.Now, water can flow or it can crash.Be water. —Bruce Lee 1. When the lineup