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
Our breath is louder on the silence of snowfall,but I can’t help missing the rain. Lately, I’ve curledinto the shape of his body until I’m formless, our sheetsclean but still hinting at
Wind Peace came at once. A cloud arrow that pierced my corpse alive. I’d been dead to all the birds and violets. It was a severance, the violent calm that ruptured a legacy
1.if you look closely—and you will—you’ll see not parts, but the suggestion of parts. the only limit isthe imagination, which naturally, turns to sex. did you ever play the original sims? did
The silence to which each sound returns, arises is always pooling. And within that pool, another silence upwells, creating caverns and currents, rooms and halls and roads— What does the mind do
Thursday – 8:15 A.M. ⠀ When the morning arrives, it comes with light sun showers and a dull pain that starts in the pit of your stomach and seems to wrap its
Even the father in this children’s cartoon is inadequate. Taking his kids to the pool, he doesn’t think to bring sunscreen, hats, towels, toys, snacks, not even water to drink—and, to think,
trying to keep it quiet I’m cramming in egg shells and potato peels emptying the fridge rolling out line after line of flag-print stamps ⠀ oh please keep it from shrieking at
feet slap dark moss soft webbed platypus plap plap plap bump on my eardrum tap tap tap cave-wall lit like a microphone my amoeba legs flow in and out lightly on
you like guns. once your stepfather shot off his own finger with a gun. the newspapers called it a domestic dispute. your mother laughs about it. your mother has a tattoo of
Stepping through the back door, I squint against the shadows before sliding into the corner booth of the bar section. The restaurant’s near empty, the way I like it. Every few weeks,