The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
America didn’t go as well for Avreml as he had imagined. The assimilation process was hard for him, and it was difficult to feel at home in the big city of New York.
sundry moments now in the
crucibles of memories
memories or imagination?
(No Place is Foreign)
to know everything
and understand everything
doesn’t guarantee I’ll be able to tell the difference between poisonous and edible
(No Place is Foreign/ translations)
The man
With the cash in his pocket.
Never less than a couple hundred.
You’d never know with what
He might be armed
At any given moment
Behind the charm.
(No Place is Foreign)
Because these times are fresh paint, fresh wax, fresh garlic. These times are new grass in the same wasteland where every spring new grass grows.
(poetry/translations)
Nothing is so dangerous as a news report wherein Palestinians die in the passive voice, the horrific violence massaged into meaningless oblivion, the perpetrators somehow irrelevant.
Some art just makes you think instantly of the seven deadly sins. Not because they traffic in, say, lust, but because they arouse feelings in you with such painful precision that it seems some dark magic has occurred.
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
I understand intimately how our society makes demands of women and creates the conditions that make it impossible to meet them. Being seen as a woman has been more of an annoyance than suffocation—until I became pregnant.
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
I hope the water of Lake Michigan knows the water of your body like kin. I hope there is soil under your nails, that the light of necessary fires burns luminous in your corneas.
Between us – a screen, a thirty-minute flight, / the friendly/ uncaring world, / car crashes, NATO drills
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
I tasted only / freedom, opportunity, knew little of /
all the difficult work my body would / endure to exist here, examine patriotism.
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
We are perhaps most free when we’re standing in front of an imposing wall, naming a roadblock to our own (or to our neighbor’s) full humanity and then throwing ourselves against that obstacle.
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
in America under a big chandelier that fills my chest with ice
Blond women selling their hair injure their faces to produce
an altered shapeliness, their lips a pert woodland scene
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
how anne frank would’ve been a belieber
& ur body beneath all those clothes
the color of my skin being important
to everyone but me
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
I am longleaf pine, soybean
and cotton fields. I am not American.
(poetry)
a dandelion doesn’t remember
when it sprouted
or how it ended up
in this yard.
(poetry/translations)
… it should be noted that this is not the first time Zimbabwe has had an incident involving someone claiming to be a dead public figure from the past.
(No Place is Foreign)
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
Her father had always believed in fairness, in giving people a hand up instead of—or maybe in addition to—a handout, in the kind of society where the strong should lift up the weak.
(fiction)
The third place winner of ACM’s second nonfiction contest, and part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
This woman, with her light touch, the woman at the clinic who held my hand during the procedure, the clinic staff, and the women who shared their stories, have given me something I seldom encountered before in life—kindness without expectation or judgment.
This is the first in our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
Unhappy with the garbage they were given, here they all came to exchange it for different garbage, and to perfume the warm December air with exhaust.
(fiction)
The winner of ACM’s second nonfiction contest:
Another way to think about a porch: as a threshold – a space one passes through on their way somewhere else, a waiting place, between in and out.
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
Tamil and English and a love of Jesus, porumaiyin sikaram, the pinnacle of patience, were drilled into them.
(fiction)
They stand in silence for a few minutes. Then his mother, in a whisper, exhales “shaman,” elongating the last syllable as if blowing cigarette smoke into the air.
(fiction)
Barnett stretches meaning in other poems to include celestial bodies and space programs as astronomical murmurs, and hauntings as the murmured warnings of systemic racism.
(review)
A renowned poet interrogates his colonized self.
(review)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
But in 1961, basketball coaches had yet to become gods. His office was only a little larger than a janitor’s closet.
That Childhood Continent Beyond Illumination are pieces from a larger suite of automatic drawing/poem paintings, intentionally completed in an afternoon.
(art and text)
Even when a partner tells me they like or love my parts, I’m too entrenched in shame about my labia to believe I could be desirable.
(nonfiction)
The novel is stamped with an epigraph: a quote from “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears. There’s an alchemy between the novel and the song that should not be overlooked—it adds an eeriness to Gråbøl’s profound yet distant prose as if the true emotion of the writing has been blunted by fear or pills.
(review)
On the last page of Eveline’s printed homicide story, she has scribbled, “The story might not follow the rules, but I got your attention, didn’t I? You’ll always remember me.”
Another Chicago Magazine 