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
Open Wide small mouth with too many teeth
When the sun drips underthe mud, I dive up. Dusk to dawn, baby. I knowwhat it is to wait all night, to holdheat in my throat like a secret. I wishI could
at some point while you create yourself you tryto
i am tired of eating mortar. my body is getting too heavy. when the girl at the ice cream shop doesn’t take my order, i joke if it’s because i’m chubby
“It’s not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out the window.” —Wallace Stevens, Letters (1966) * * * “Where do you want the window?” Everett asks, standing on the unframed
I hushed my child, remembered the fallen squirrel who wouldn’t cryand how we played hours of recorded wails until its mother heard, pulled it from our dried fruits, nuts, towels, capful of water, and fled.
Oh Honey, Bless Your Heart There’s nothin like Nana’s kitchen with the angled door frames and the sound of everybody bein ugly.
Letter from a Young Poet “Do not write love-poems; avoid at first those forms that are too facile and commonplace: they are themost difficult, for it takes a great, fully matured power
We watch PBS and learnhow every bird was a dinosaur,how the earliest whales were wolveswho found the water goodand disappeared into it. I get high enough to see that death is merelya change
You misunderstand me, mother. You, who do not soften into me. I’ve always wanted to say that to you. Now that I have, I must remark on lesser things: our pinky nail