You cannot remember your very first bed, yet its quality defines the rest, because the slats of milk-tasting slumber, though they may bend, buckle, and widen with time, never disappear.
(No Place is Foreign)
Tag: Another Chicago Magazine
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
Unlike dementia, infant loss doesn’t induce a lingering forgetfulness. The pain of the birth, the fear of seeing Sophia’s tiny red body, the way her skin tore as she rolled on my chest, the slowing of her chest rising and falling, the doctor calling her time of death—remembering it all again was torture.
Hoffman’s stories revolve around a sense of being adrift. We drive, but go nowhere. We make loops and return to where we began. We are trapped within our decaying bodies, caught in systemic poverty, and broken by familial rupture.
(reviews)
Someone is calling to you from the sea,
beating the heavy waves with his tired hands.
(poetry/translations)
Shulman’s collection guides readers through the ideological formation of American Jewish children, teenagers, and young adults, showing how they are carefully acculturated to conflate Judaism with Zionism—a fusion designed to keep dollars and political will flowing toward Israel, no matter how ferociously it attacks or constrains the people who also occupied the land now called Israel before 1948.
(reviews)
In Kiefer’s Maine, the trucks, soon to contain slaughtered chickens, have “waiting mouths,” “the air [has] feathers”—as if all that’s left of that life is scattered to the wind. Kiefer braids losses throughout the book; it can feel as if loss, like farm grit, “filters into every soft thing.”
(reviews)
“We live in a world of translation—and mistranslation, as between the coexisting people and languages there’s a lot of noise—meaning, all the elements that don’t let the message from the source be appropriately received,” Dimitris Lyacos tells interviewer Toti O’Brien.
jail bars no stars no cars
just jail bars hard time
in the pen no friends cuz
they will do you in hard
time in the pen no friend
that what you get out of
doing hard time hard time
-Carvis Johnson, anthologized by Louis Bourgeois
(abolition/carceral state)
“As it relates to Unit 29 specifically, writing offered a rare opportunity to convey a message that would actually be read. For some, it was an opportunity to attempt something they never tried before. The act of writing and the program itself allowed for a structure by which they could order their lives in a chaos that barely ever sleeps,” Louis Bourgeois tells interviewer Mike Puican.
“Book bans have existed as long as there have been books, throughout history, just like war. It’s a form of war; part of war; part of politics and power grabs; part of trying to keep the population ignorant and deny people books. It’s also part of antisemitism and racism and every other oppressive movement you can think of,” Donna Seaman tells interviewer Carol Haggas.
suns as yellow as ours
gleaming suns
from lives like matches
atrocious explosions
scattering ashes
like bright corollas
(translations/ poetry)
And upon learning the true purpose of the miners, we Chiricahua forced abandonment of the Santa Rita del Cobre copper mine for decades. Ultimately, it was we Chiricahua whom the US Army, acting as agent for mining interests, did their best to kill in the nineteenth century. “But we’re still here,” Vic said and let that stew.
(No Place is Foreign)
I didn’t know we lived a few counties
south from where Frederick Douglass stood
half-naked, one shirt for a whole winter.
His hands smaller than my brother’s
who took all the jokes on the school bus
(poetry)
how many egrets lost footing in the candles of your chest,
syllables broken by rust?
(poetry/ No Place is Foreign)
This is piece is a part of our Palestinian Voices series, featuring work by Palestinian writers and artists, including people who are part of the Palestinian diaspora.
It’s like they learned where Gaza is or finally understood that a Gazan outside of Gaza, one that sees adulthood, is rare.
(nonfiction/Palestinian Voices)
The room dark and emptied now, Elisha sits alone in the first row looking up at the piano he’s filled with ghosts.
(fiction)
Robert Shapard’s Bare Ana doesn’t only platform flash—it weaponizes it. These stories are tiny grenades: compact enough to pocket, but powerful enough to leave a mark.
(reviews)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
No wonder Mr. Barde is struggling to fall asleep, considering his job where hypertension goes without saying. So, he suffers patiently, reads until impossible hours, and sometimes plays at cultivating insomnia, gaining thus beaches of meditation, wanderings in thought fostered by silence.
(translations)
This is the first in our Palestinian Voices series, featuring work by Palestinian writers and artists, including people who are part of the Palestinian diaspora.
The dignified broadcaster on TV smiled. “The boy’s mouth is now a restricted military zone,” he announced.
(Palestinian Voices/ Translations)
I wish I’d thought to shove my friend L. off his drum throne, sit in his place, and try my hand at the kit. But in my defense, this was high school in the 1970s, when teenaged girls didn’t play drums.
(nonfiction)
Inside the mountain of smoke were orange, flickering circles like tornado funnels. And they were bearing south at what was clearly a tremendous speed. This was the Palisades Fire, the worst urban firestorm in a century.
(nonfiction)
Man’s resentment at her for being torn in half, forced to share his Maker’s image but not enough to spare. He wept petitions in the lap of Tigris and Euphrates, “Please, please!” he moaned, “She’s too singular to be understood!”
(poetry)
My mother insisted
til the day she died
that I was born at a very early age
I still don’t know if I believe that
(poetry)
I wasn’t blameless. I’d slammed doors, I’d yelled. One time, I threw a plate against the wall and it shattered. But when someone hits you, you leave. That’s what you do, even if no one else loves you but your cat.
(fiction)
The song might be the length it took for a historic city to be destroyed (twenty-two minutes) one February evening.
Who collects the snow globes of war and of fathers?
A collection of snow globes, each says “it is snowing.”
(poetry)
if the Earth would just split in two
& one half would take its leave
I’d take a seat on the other half
& absorb the blue skies above
(translations/poetry)
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
Children cough, wheeze, inhale the gas, and rub burning eyes in the capital city through January. Inhalers are in demand. The government talks about creating artificial rain to clear up the sky.
(nonfiction)
Farmwork required
strong hands and body
not the somersaults
of ABCs in the mind.
(No Place is Foreign)
That’s the thing about addiction. It hides in plain sight, promising to quit. At first it itches, and then it hurts a little, but then it just becomes who you are.
(nonfiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
Though I have only recently revealed myself to him, Eddie identifies me as the culprit, which kicks off a harangue: How could you do it? Why? Why? Why? and the like, all vocalized aloud.
Another Chicago Magazine 