So much of Jillian’s life nowadays feels perfectly fine with Mark. Their one disagreement is what they should’ve done about Hannah. Mark thinks they were too lenient, too oblivious along the way. He always brings up the Halloween when Hannah had just turned sixteen. There were signs back then.
(fiction)
They who love so lawlessly your laws cannot contain them. They who sacrifice so willingly you are willing to sacrifice them.
(nonfiction)
I went to the lakefront at sunrise, but the beach and
sky were empty, and my dear friend
was not there.
(poetry/Palestinian Voices)
in my city, two fallen en route
to a market, eight more
at an intersection
of a hospital, ice
in their cheeks, hair, lips as if
they said goodbye
(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 WhatsApp my cousin on his jubilee. He was born the day after the Yom Kippur War started, and here again: rockets, hostages, my aunt fainting. Can we celebrate anything without a backdrop of mourning, or—unlike the other day in Ukraine—even mourn, not adding at the memorial half a village to the slain?
(Ukraine)
Anesthesia for the moment. Anesthesia for the pain. The anesthesiologist’s line: “Don’t worry, you won’t remember this when you wake up,” is precisely what worried me. I didn’t remember. What else had I missed?
(nonfiction)
this sharpness
of ritual burns
toward expiation, but
the body kindles
(poetry)
The problem was that each believed themselves to be a good person. Ethical, if not moral. And yet here they were on a bench not talking about the thing that existed between them.
(fiction)
Nausea knocked around my empty stomach with nothing to temper it. This woman looked just like the Wikipedia image of Edith Wharton I fell asleep to. Was I seeing pixels come to life? No. I needed to get a healthier sleep schedule now that Ramadan was over, it was clearly affecting my brain.
(fiction)
