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.
CHARLES YU is the author of three books, including the novel How to
Winner of the EXTINCTION Essay Contest, selected by Lacy M. Johnson
Someone calls the afterlife a palace of portraits hung in empty halls then mauls the meat and veggie platters. We cannot decide
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
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
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.
Scratches in the celluloid / show a frame-rate / his mind shown / in the quick tilt of his head / as he observes a painting / the black-and-white print of his
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
where you’re –so– worn out ⠀⠀⠀you won’t mind ⠀⠀⠀being wiped out; ⠀⠀⠀hell, you’ll even thank the tsunami for ⠀⠀⠀flicking you off ⠀⠀⠀the face of this ⠀⠀⠀flaming planet far far away ⠀⠀⠀from that
I know girls sometimes do witchcraft. I’m at a pizza parlor two blocks down from my job. This is where I meet Margaret. I’m on my lunch break from driving warehouse forklifts.
I knew it was time to leave Florida when the sinkhole ate Buddy. I was sitting in a kiddie pool with the hose running, throwing a mangled tennis ball for him to
Ode to Ghosts “There’s always someone younger and hungrier coming down the stairs after you.” – Showgirls To the ghost shepherding a motorcycle into the guard rail at night A ghost pulling