I was twenty-two in 1992. Death was all around me. Working at the community center was only my second or third job after college; I thought it was usual, even ordinary, for people who you worked with every day to die.
(nonfiction)
Author: Another Chicago Magazine
The translator was now bedeviled by even the simplest particles. Does “and” or “but” go better here? Periods and commas likewise became insurmountable hindrances, veritable lions in the road, guardians of the original meaning.
(fiction)
Mercury is in retrograde when we swear our blood oath, palms sliced with butterfly knives stolen from the Berkeley flea market. We promise to live fast and die young and press our bloody hands together, holding them still until they coagulate.
(nonfiction)
In the kitchen, the mixing of the ingredients was quite simple—the Aunt Jemima mix, eggs, and water. Not so simple was my grandmother raising her daughter’s two kids for ten years, her daughter having gone off to San Francisco to experience the cultural revolution of the sixties and seventies.
(nonfiction)
The Russian lived with his parents and grandparents on the other side of town in a tiny crumbling apartment near the library.
(fiction)
I get that’s what happens to her. But can a Korean man love a woman twenty years older?
(drama)
I watched the bag disappear around the corner. The wheels of the gurney creaked in the distance.
Are they always so handsome? I wanted to ask.
(fiction)
Her suffering fits right into the camera.
(fiction)
“Firing Squad, Convergence, Jackson Pollock”
“Metronome Maple & Betye Saar”
We ask for bread and are not / satisfied. We ask for stone / and sand runs through our fingers. (Jewish poetry)
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)
Another Chicago Magazine 