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
The theme of this special issue was inspired, in part, by a
These rainbow worlds of swirling nebulae / arrest you as you thumb / past smug celebrities, vacation shots / and selfies hoping to inflame an ex. / Golden discs of galaxies are
My body hair / Like barbed wire / Prickly tumbleweed / Thorns in soft cotton / A high desert grave / This land is mine / This dust / These bones /
She heats up a bowl of rice drizzled with pork fat. She adds a splash of soy sauce to the steaming heap and squats down on a foot stool in the kitchen to
I find her asleep in bed, still dreaming her dream that summoned me here. I switch on the small glowing halo of her make-up mirror, study my face awhile before climbing onto
Our compasses fail us again and again, leading us along the wrong magnetic fields, yet we sail still through quiet seas under the false mathematics of north. What the frontier means. Not conquering. Not masculinity, not like
A dress on a body with a face that breaks into a smile like mine. My little stick figure boy. My son, hot-headed in the yellow sun. Fum-ing at the tips of your fingers
1 Where else can you watch a bicep shakelike water trembling above a cup’s lip, or help lift weight from a stranger’s chest,watch him rise from a bench, and, with one look,
The warm waters of the Kasilof got me dreaming about salmon or I’m dreaming about salmon in the warm waters of the Kasilof or I’m dreaming I am holding you—holding onto you like
If I were a pet you owned / would you check all the line breaks to find me / once the sun fell into its bleak / trashcan and the sloppy /
For my beloved, / A. You get me through, / B. to get me through. / A. Sahib; A Companion. / B. Safar; A Journey. / There are certain places I can't
