Does literary fame play a role in your quest as a writer and if so, does it play a positive role, or a negative one?
(nonfiction)
Tag: art
Do you need to be a good person in order to be a great poet?
(nonfiction)
The flight attendant checked the row number printed on the overhead compartments, consulted her paper, then looked directly at Mia. “You are a doctor?”
(fiction)
The work is not going well. Why is the work not going well? I think. Wait. I ran out of medication.
(nonfiction)
This is when I realize that sunglasses weren’t invented to keep the sun out of your eyes.
(fiction)
She returned home when her village was liberated after six months of occupation. Her house greeted her with a collapsed wall.
(translations)
It was late in the evening and dark, the dark river with its lights passing by, reflections from the Seine travelling across the ceiling, sliding along the walls.
I have not / strayed far from the dead. I see their hip favored / executives and can pick them out from big / crowds
That day has never ended. / The fence he built is still new.
The latest piece in our DEBUT section, which showcases the first literary work published by a writer, beyond a campus-only magazine
“Sometimes I feel like a beetle. / Hanging on to a blade of grass / for dear life while what others describe / as a gentle breeze knocks the wind out of me.”
(poetry)
It’s theirs as much as mine, / this house, their great black wings / sweeping past windows as the day unfolds
(poetry)
After double shifts / waiting tables at the country club, / she soaks herself pruny, / floats on the water until the streetlights hum.
(poetry)
The historical cloth covers two forms / beating like the angels’ hard bodies in the midst of changing time.
(poetry)
Entangled one with another they watch us. / The good died too soon.
(translations)
O, old ocean! the river has mixed with your waters / where I so often bathed
In the weeks and months after the operation, he’d wake from sleep, sounds tooting up from his throat not so much snores as noisy requests for air.
(fiction)
Michelangelo said, / “I saw the angel in the marble / And carved until I set him free.”
(poetry)
Revolution / is the party we throw / at our unhappiness when we discover it / looks like tyranny
(poetry)
“I look up to those people who have nothing at all but their own body, which is used to the core: the rickshaw pullers, the sweepers, the mothers in rags…”
(fiction)
The roof soars so high above the sky’s hanging at arm’s length / And you, dear, are now drunk on a thousand glasses of wine
“Looking up / the wave of your gaze arrived / upon my shore.”
He demands I be a man. What is it to be a man? I ask him.
“In this story, day zero is when I live, and you die.”
(fiction)
“for just a moment I lived / through what they may have felt”
There’s joy on Easter, and that joy lasts a long time. And Lent, it’s not about food, it’s about self-sacrifice, humbling yourself before God. You’re saying, You’re the big guy. I’m the small guy.
You tell me to keep my ass out of the road, and to stay the hell away / from the poison ivy and Virginia creeper because my skin reacts to / everything.
It doesn’t matter which language you speak, because language does not influence your way of thinking.
