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
the water becomes a villagewhere the ghost of the boy you were first learned to swim. you remember full moonsthat lasted entire months, swans who thought they were sparrows,sparrows certain they were
Daily promise of blankness Scraping against whiteness Not loneliness but loneliness The house is not the room is not the bed is not the moment is not Cold nestling in after My
it’s not the child
Child of my body, you are from me. I gave birth to you. Yet you are from another time,another place. My mother died when I was a toddler. My father remarried and
against the shed, my bike leans, rusting. i pick off my legs a handful of sand spurs. i save them in a jar. i save everything that cuts me, from paper to
When the Editor Asks if the Suicidal Ideation is a Persona in his rejection email I appreciate it honestlyI do but I wish he was right that that endless tunnel was just
War exists in beautiful places.In the arms of a galaxy, symbiotic stars swallow each otherand in the shallows of a reef, a four-armed sea star spreadsover a shell like a chromosome. Scarred,
not the Titan, but my home built without a bomb shelter,and built to house bombs. Explosions—unlike implosions—happen over the course of felt moments. Skirts are blown upwardas Trinitrotoluene flushes cheeks yellow. Gravel
One empties and fills; the other trickles. Both keep me afloat.
I’m pretty sure I got the job at Midnight Express because I didn’t ask if it was illegal. I wasn’t background checked, as far as I know. I didn’t sign any non-disclosure