I don’t know how to hold onto the warmth of the image of Ray picking up the kids, dappled in sunlight, with the statistics of suicide that run through my mind as I think about Lizzie.
(nonfiction)
Tag: photography
His cheek, cool on asphalt, shining before he closed
his eyes: the pigeon’s neck, shimmering
(poetry)
plant
a single seed
germinate
be
a lusty weed
die out
then again sprout
a life
(poetry)
One of the famous Iranian rug patterns is the Tree of Life, in which the tree is often located on the vertical symmetry line of the carpet. The tree symbolizes the connection of earthly beings to the heavens.
(poetry)
I’ve never thought of myself as someone with a scar, but in this portrait, the damage from a dog bite is clearly visible next to my nose. A dent, a scratch, and a bump, a kind of trinity.
(fiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“In the end when they ask would I do it again // I’ll shake my head: where does one draft / end and another begin?”
I might have lived a life or two / instead of counting steps in the parking lot, / between the rust-colored cars, / missing you.
The summer heat sprawls on my skin like a thick cover of wet glue.
(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)
I compliment / the man on his black leather jacket and he hangs it on my / shoulders and says, I think you’ll like it better than me, bunny.
i go to school to see mary but learn louis xvi was beheaded in front of an empty / pedestal
When I see a half-fallen curtain, / I see an eye on the verge of sleep.
(poetry)
But those who press the grapes now, / who toil from morning till night, / they’ve disowned us…
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I have not / strayed far from the dead. I see their hip favored / executives and can pick them out from big / crowds
the cup’s round mouth // gives a satisfying quiver / between the teeth
His job was merely to photograph: to catalogue the state of the problem. Save the radiology for radiologists.
(fiction)
I trip on cobblestones sticking out of the earth like busted tombstones.
(nonfiction)
It’s the last corner of paradise, here, evaporating like spit on a hot sidewalk.
(nonfiction)
“The singer experienced considerable challenges during [the 1980s] : On the positive side, she recaptured the wide public’s attention with her hit 1985 album “Who’s Zoomin’ Who?” But she also lost her father, C.L. Franklin, in 1984 after a 1979 gunshot put him in a five-year coma,” music critic Aaron Cohen writes.
Another Chicago Magazine 