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
dollar store sonnet i’m a five-below tree frog bitch so i can’t tellthe difference between the tree, the general, family$1. usually there’s a section where thingsare 8 times $1, so after i
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
it’s not the child
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
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
One empties and fills; the other trickles. Both keep me afloat.
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
Notes on My Present and Past After Natalie Scenters-Zapico With Statements From Century of Dishonor from Helen Hunt Jackson 1881 I made a pact with myself, to speak more joy, to fill
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