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
I got our mouse. In a glue-trap on the basement landing. I shined my cellphone and it tried to free itself by undulating like this dancer we saw on Make America Fun
each morning, spangling the loton sidewalks, at crosswalks, across the new campusas if grackle stanchion, as if
1. at cracked marrow of the double yellow line extraction crane buckles down bare fork prong crookless end of
I didn’t stop to take the snapshot and now I can’t: the gas station’s mansard roof has been peeled off as part of a renovation and gone are the letters, painted over
Rylan won’t change the lightbulb in the living room. She won’t sit down to read, watch a movie or play scrabble there, and it’s all because of the heads. She doesn’t say
Cleave With a mother so sweet and easy to please, I had little opportunity to exercise obnoxious contrariness. She would usually say “dikkatli ol” and then let me go my American way.
Honestly, there was nothing to see — just two women, mother-daughter-friends on a mid-summer day, tangled hands on summerhouse cushions, pinked apple blossoms drifting — I must have been dreaming of the sweet
Someone calls the afterlife a palace of portraits hung in empty halls then mauls the meat and veggie platters. We cannot decide
It’s 1982. She’s a junior in college, an English major, spending the spring academic quarter studying art and literature in England. The cuisine is awful: gloppy meat pies, mushy peas, Marmite, treacly-sweet
Flow for Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi On learning of your passingI’m shot back in timeto the discovery of your booksand concepts, to teachingmyself how to enter that alteredstate of concentrationwhere creativityspills into spontaneityand