That need for a map—to marriage? To love? To sex? To life?—seems to have dominated the lives of my parents, who vied for their analyst’s attentions like children for that of a favorite babysitter.
(nonfiction)
Tag: acm
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)
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)
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)
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)
“Faces”
“In Contemplation of an ‘Ornamental’ Banana Tree on the Grounds of a Resort While Vacationing”
“Antoine’s Graft”
“A Quiet State After Some Period of Disturbance”
“Exalted or Worthy of Complete Devotion”
“I often wondered about the effect of living with no windows.”
(fiction)
“Firing Squad, Convergence, Jackson Pollock”
“Metronome Maple & Betye Saar”
“A Late Exam at the River Lethe”
“Palinode”
“Canto XXXIII”
“Canto XXXVI”
1. In a commercial, a Chinese-American laundry owner promotes an “ancient Chinese secret” and his wife…
yet sometimes a child’s song, key to something / that is not, surely not, nothing, as after Patroklos is speared. (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)
content warning: rape and other violent assault
At the toll, I ask, Is the tunnel very long? I’m claustrophobic in tunnels, enclosed spaces. Can’t even drive a car into a car wash.
(nonfiction)
With each video, I knew Pete was getting closer to his death. I never believed he would make it out alive.
(nonfiction)
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)
On our / walk the hound and I / noted something fecund.
(poetry)
The invisible turns home into battlegrounds and destroys the romance between man and woman. These details never make it to history books.
(nonfiction)
You spend the winter telling me it’s almost summer.
(nonfiction)
“If countries were people, we wouldn’t invite them to our parties because they are too monstrous,” Robin Hemley tells Julia Lieblich.
My friend was talking to her brother on Skype when a mouse–
(nonfiction)
everything we could stand to lose to the devil
(poetry)
Another Chicago Magazine 