“I help my clients open their chakras, channel their sensual energy, and find their heart space.”
“Heart space?” I ask.
“Yeah…like, you know,” she says, placing her hand just above my left breast. “Many of my clients have trouble with love.”
I stare at her.
(fiction)
Krystal developed into a first-string basketball player, and in junior high she’d been scouted. The acting-out years began and Krystal was sent to Elan, a residential school for troubled teens.
(nonfiction)
When it became clear that Azar did not have the speed, synchronization or physical strength to filet an adequate number of codfish per hour, the manager moved him to the women’s line.
(nonfiction)
The day before the world was supposed to end, Kasumi woke up in the morning and slipped into her school uniform as usual.
(fiction)
It is in this bed, after all, our bed, that I have most exposed myself, that I have been both sick and happy: secure, protected, and yet in the next moment, utterly, existentially alone. In a real dark night of the soul, Fitzgerald writes, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
(nonfiction)
“The Paris of the Americas”
“Obligatorium”
“Monsoon Season: Morenci AZ”
“Plucked”
“Memory as Diary”
It all seemed too much to successfully handle, but there was nothing else to do.
(nonfiction)
Ruth couldn’t quite forget that her husband, David, had slept with Diana before he slept…
It isn’t genteel to point out, but spit can be beautiful. It’s an ordinary beauty—the parabola, the clearly practiced skill.
(nonfiction)
“Free Solo Climbing”
“A Beautiful Fiasco”
(fiction)
There’s a telephone. Three syllables, telephone, so it’s the kind with the handle—you could bring it from room to room only with the help of long cords, like a medical attachment of saline. Its speaking and listening parts imitated your own. Meeting in a kind of lonely kiss: plastic, teeth, cartilage, bone.
(nonfiction)
“Black people often comment on the fact that when you see some person’s name trending on Twitter among your circles, someone Black who you’ve never heard of, your first thought is, ‘My God, someone has been murdered again,'” Eve Ewing tells ACM poetry editor Tara Betts.
In 2010 life changed in Bear’s Corner. Outsiders know the place as Komi. That was the year the bears came to eat us.
(fiction)
“Make/Shift drops the reader and characters into worlds, time, and the mind itself. In this debut collection of eleven short stories with three ‘commercial breaks’ between stories, author Joe Sacksteder hypnotizes you with his imagination, beckoning you to join him down the rabbit hole,” Michael Gawdzik writes.
(review)
You won’t find much radical analysis in contemporary fiction: Trump is stupid, rude, a racist, and a misogynist; his election was a completely unsuspected usurpation of both a deserving candidate and the norms that bound an imperfect but fundamentally good country together.
(review)
“Each inch of the park is designed to trick visitors into thinking they’ve left New York for a Parisian garden, the Catskills, Wonderland, or that they are themselves Henry Hudson discovering Manhattan,” David Andrew Stoler writes of Stephen Wolf’s book on Central Park.
(review)
“Love Letter 16. Ring of Fifths”
“Love Letter 18. Words Are Wind in Shut Spaces”
Another Chicago Magazine 