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
Eden Sundays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays brought up in belief before it was mine bible thumping, backneck kinda indoctrination on our hands and knees before the Lord that everlasting ache in the rib of Eve subservient, superpassible by the
The synthesizer forgetting and remembering itself. The four slow notes of time; descending breath of God.It helps that the fish get stranger as you go, and the children either fall asleep or silent. Young
Monk I Driving the I-90 I met a Monk. Monk and I became friends of a material wealth. One day Monk pricked a flower from between the highway cracks and told me to put
The Wildcat Den The sunset drapes gold and pink over the city,melting against adobe walls,where murals breathe storiesof ancestors who once danced in the dust.The scent of carne asada curls through the
Dad teaches me how to make rice: “Measure the rice with your heart, then fill the water to your knuckle.” The tap fills the black pot as a cloud of starch rises.
I’d just hopped on an airplane, on my way home from a tennis weekend with friends, when my daughter, Elana called—a phone call that would send me reeling. “M-o-o-o-o-o-m-m-m-m-m,” she wailed. It
Divorced and in my fifties, I entered a relationship with Ben. At 64, he was compact, attractive, and also divorced, with wavy gray hair, and hips even slimmer than mine. Ben’s tender,
It’s nearly dark and the moon’s unrisen.The brightest stars shine through a scrim of clouds and fog. I am watching for you.Most of the neighbors have gone inside for dinner and television
And if I did mean somethingcoded: waterI can’t walk on, coastline charred from anothernameless fire blazinga red wood, photographsrecovered in the oceanoff an archipelago, preserving for posteritythe dinghies and the sheep.And if
My father, as an untamed young hunter and fisher, was camping near a stream when the volcano Mt. St. Helens blew on May 18, 1980. Far from phone lines and newspapers, he
