When my father measured women in percentages, I learned to chart myself like livestock—head, pelvis, torso. Yet the red horse leaned his warmth into me, the chickadees sang, and the body refused to stay math. Years later, back home, I discover what love weighs when you stop counting.
(fiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
He had written DECEASED next to my mother’s name on his return. That threw the whole system off, sending his return into the void for further review. Since the entire IRS was working from home due to Covid-19, which arrived approximately two weeks after my mother’s death, apparently every day was now Leap Day, and perhaps in another four years my father might get his refund.
I would need help to enter, hesitatingly, into my mother’s sick body, to bite into her cancer, twist it every which way, let it melt on my tongue like a communion wafer, pierce it with my teeth and let out all its juice, its pus, lick my fingers. It would definitely taste like something unfamiliar, but I’d continue, that’s how the abscess would burst, how I’d heal my mother, how I’d heal from my mother, it would be enough for me to swallow her whole, she would be in me, and I’d spit her out again to rid myself of her.
(fiction)
My sister wrapped her arms around me. I did not cry. I felt nothing.
(nonfiction)
To be seen was to be ashamed and to admit to experiencing pleasure was to be disgusting.
(nonfiction)
I held my magazines in my lap and looked longingly out the window, believing myself to be a melancholic character in the movie of my life.
(fiction)
The winner of ACM’s inaugural Nonfiction Contest
My mother tells me stories about when she was little and then makes me promise not to tell anyone.
(nonfiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“Once upon a time, long ago in northern Hungary, the land of the Matyó, a beautiful boy and girl were deeply in love.”
(fiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“I am doing well, but soon I feel / the rolling thunder of an evil rudo / with a toxic fanbase”
(poetry)
Another Chicago Magazine 