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)
“That which befell you neither occurred nor didn’t occur”
“At the end of every season”
“Discover the place where you live”
(poetry)
When one language dies by ceasing to be spoken or otherwise embodied, so too perishes an entirely singular way of being human.
(nonfiction)
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)
Fast-forward twenty-something years and here I am, with my own children on the block and a refrigerator full of herbs, greens, fruits, and vegetables.
(nonfiction)
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)
He isn’t here today, and his empty desk seemed emptier than all the other empty desks, where half of the students saw an opportunity to capitalize on tragedy and get a day out of school.
(nonfiction)
“Roberts has described her work as “vignettes of meaningless experiences,” but this meandering, nonlinear work feels honest in its making mountains out of molehills” write reviewers Nora Hickey and Amaris Feland Ketcham.
(graphic nonfiction review)
If my father wanted me to know about Armenia, why hadn’t he said, “Here, Peter, read this,” or “Son, did I ever tell you what happened to Armenia?”
(nonfiction)
In both cases—the poem and the trembling couple—I seem to love the very thing that raises questions for me in my own life: I love how settled the pizza eaters and the bean eaters are with each other.
(nonfiction)
The Russian lived with his parents and grandparents on the other side of town in a tiny crumbling apartment near the library.
(fiction)
“In Stepanova’s voyage there is life and death, silence and narrative, memory and oblivion” writes reviewer Marek Makowski.
(fiction review)
Excerpt from “Complemento” by Rafael Guizado, translated from the Spanish (Colombia) by Gigi Guizado
My job is this: be what the others are not.
(drama)
I get that’s what happens to her. But can a Korean man love a woman twenty years older?
(drama)
Most of the lies were about my mother, but I only learned about the lies years later at my mother’s deathbed
(fiction)
“Can we go to your place?” I asked at the coffee shop after he said that Blue Nights was Didion’s magnum opus. I argued in favor of Magical Thinking but he said the most feverish hallucinations of grief shone through her later work.
(nonfiction)
To know how to exploit the weaknesses in human nature in order to best serve Christ is one of the paradoxes of the inquisitor’s calling.
(fiction)
After the woman / tells him how that first night really went. After months pass, / and this child is born. After this child’s first birthday, / first day of school, First Communion, first love, / first loss, first child, that child’s first introduction to Grandpa.
(nonfiction)
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)
Another Chicago Magazine 