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
A Short Film Starring Me at a Bathhouse I have a line of men waiting to see me. Inside, their hands extend when I walk down halls.I can see their palms glisten
My heart, a jackalbecoming wild,for beholdingat a distance.⠀ I wake up unrelenting.I stay that way forever.⠀ No sound but a sirenfrom my mouth.I sit in the stainand gnash at myself.⠀ All animal,
I’ve always balked at playing scalesbut I’ll stand on a girderhipshot in floral board shorts,a vintage weirdo pokingthe membrane between here and now.⠀ I need my sea green eyeshadesto scan this fiddly
Jalal-Abad, Kyrgyzstan, 1997 ⠀ Snow——the silencewithin silences——a flickering streetlamp——your gloved hand——⠀⠀ Р е м о н т scrawled in Cyrillic on an abandoned shack——the good-night kiss——[⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ] ——then the small, fused heat
The Bispham Dairy Farm We wandered and settledon the Bispham Dairy Farmwhere the hills disappeared and the countryside flattened,a land filled with Palmetto Palms with sand no seed could sprout. My father became
The carnival had flattened out like a tarp over the grounds outside the Montana town only that morning, so no one had seen her yet, kneeling next to Venus, spinning an empty
Having a car in the city is shameless if you really think about it. I would even go as far as to say it makes you a sinvergüenza, as my mother would
save for the shitty under-aged tattoos, you’d never know i was once sixteen— your dad’s hot tub a gumbo of gumption and too-cool girls cash crumpled and rediscovered under the passenger seat,
The scarecrow thawed & we readied it for the garden.I wanted to rub the purple botches on the Dahlia’ssoft white petals. A robin oblivious to me stoodon earth as soft as bread
In December 2014, I had just completed my first semester of a creative writing MFA in Boston and was home for the holiday break. Mileage may vary for those in MFAs—and elsewhere,