We ask for bread and are not / satisfied. We ask for stone / and sand runs through our fingers. (Jewish poetry)
Author: Another Chicago Magazine
That’s how it is with my kind: our own body betrays us / our own tongue turns us in to the authorities. (Jewish poetry)
1. In a commercial, a Chinese-American laundry owner promotes an “ancient Chinese secret” and his wife…
So why had she made such a fuss in the first place? Plus weren’t they both growing old? Surely, a dribble here or there shouldn’t seem such a big deal. (fiction)
In the old language / we told the best stories of your life, / and for the first time in my life / I felt I really understood you.
(Jewish poetry)
Two white haired ladies / miles from Memphis. / Would apologies be offered / for words only one / remembers?
(Jewish poetry)
[More than a year after COVID’s US arrival, ACM looks back.]
I can tell you that I saw an old couple walking their dog. Have I never seen this before?
(nonfiction)
in the center of my heart they buried a limewood carving of a bird.
(poetry)
[A year after COVID’s US arrival, ACM looks back.]
We found a way of existing where we didn’t have to know who lived and who died.
(nonfiction)
With each video, I knew Pete was getting closer to his death. I never believed he would make it out alive.
(nonfiction)
This is, in one sense, all of us talking. Although you’re not in a context at the moment where you were expecting to speak.
(drama)
I had the gun now because it made me feel safe for myself, Dean, and the rest of the monitors at this poll site. It made me feel safe in the way that the president’s people were made to feel safe when he exercised his gun-lobby muscle and equivocated about good people being on “both sides” of an incendiary protest scenario.
(nonfiction)
It’s while waiting for the light at the corner of Twenty-eighth and Sixth Avenue that you first hear it: a soft hissing sound.
(fiction)
She’d come to California a couple weeks before, staying with her brother, reminding me of how my mom relied, at times, on my Uncle Ken.
(nonfiction)
Robber barons are laughing themselves silly as they devour your / neighbors. / Don’t worry. / It’s not you they are after.
(poetry)
It had crushed her trailer / while she watched / Queen for a Day / on a TV crowned with rabbit ears.
(poetry)
what can somewhere provide beside a concrete babbling brook / with loose boulders.
(poetry)
Chicago, / I’ll stick around as long as you’ll take me or leave me.
(poetry)
Every day their breath brushes back and forth / like wind erosion over the etched inscriptions / that say our veterans are our heroes.
(poetry)
How could / the hand’s reflexive twitch undo centuries of survival? / Something as simple as an approaching outlier of thunder / cause devastation to a thing come so far?
(poetry)
“Carol Ann Davis makes us ache in these essays and lets the quiet moments explode within our hearts,” writes reviewer S.T. Brant.
(nonfiction reviews)
Years passed. The joke continued. So did the dustings.
(nonfiction)
Malé is now the besieged capital of the submerged Maldives, built up precariously on the ruins of oil tanks and docking derricks, apartment blocks and concrete breakwaters.
(fiction)
Walking changed her.
(nonfiction)
Who knew so many people needed relationship advice from lawyers?
(drama)
Her keys might have opened the church, and she the one to serve sponge fingers like death.
(The Loop)
You waltz in here, a first-time patient, and act like we owe you something.
(drama)
So now what are we going to do?
(nonfiction)
The invisible turns home into battlegrounds and destroys the romance between man and woman. These details never make it to history books.
(nonfiction)
With boys comes a lot of stress. You worry about how you can buy him his own place, or you worry about who he’ll bring into your house.
(fiction)
