I fell out, and I was born. That’s it. There’s nothing else to it. But birth did not mark my beginning: I began the day a classmate deemed me worthy to behold the knowledge of the ‘Superman S’. I began gap-toothed. I began in a farmer’s market sample bucket, and I hope to meet my […]
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AUGUST, 2016.Saint Theresa St. It’s the orange sand, clawing at the big black rocks clawing at the sea. It’s the sun, rising above Pondicherry as our car speeds past the used bookstore where my father would get math books, notes written clumsily in the margins by some senior student who was leaving—leaving for good. Each […]
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I learned my father had broken into his neighbor’s apartment and stolen her underwear in the wake of his passing. I’d been told many things about him by those who had known him better than I had, and the stolen underwear was just one. He had a good sense of humor. He was unduly rude […]
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I live by the fifth-most-dangerous intersection of roads in the state of Michigan. I once heard a car crash into a house across the street, and a woman shrieking no over and over again in the early hours of the morning. This is the only thing I dislike about where I live. When I walk […]
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“When can you start?” “As soon as I’m needed.” “Classes begin in two weeks. Faculty orientation sessions this week. I can print you out a copy of the schedule.” There are many things you’re left to discover on your own when signing on as an adjunct instructor. You need a parking pass that costs $350 […]
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By mid-morning, the sun had straggled above the river, and Carmen was again staring at one of the rich boys from Palo Alto. It was the middle of a sweltering and unstoppable summer, the Fourth of July in waiting. The light laked its way across the sidewalk to where the two of us sat, under […]
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The bleach-white lights of the Mary-Greeley maternity ward were buzzing like the cicadas in May when you walked in. Except it was December. Dawn was no nearer than dusk, and outside, the first flakes of snow twirled like Tchaikovsky’s dancers before settling on the 2004 Toyota Sienna Appa had bought last month. There were two […]
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I was born as an ode to this country—skin and sinew spun from the American Dream, from my mother’s stretch marks and growing pains. She chose my name because it means “blossom” in her language—because she wanted me to grow and climb and soak in the sun of opportunity, to bask in the privilege she […]
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There are mangoes now. There always have been, of course—just because something stops tasting good doesn’t mean it stops growing—but there are mangoes again. There are mangoes, and there is the cerulean sky, and there is sweet, sticky amber coating my palms and racing toward my elbows. In the winter, they grow Crayola yellow and […]
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for Native Child Lauren Keyana Palmer –championship speller,teenage pimp,and all-around baddie –came clean like y’all asked:The average dude she gave a shot and a babyhad the audacity, tenacity, and gymnasticsto put his hands on her.And some of y’all were so busy caping for the clown,you only wanted talk about the Usher serenadelike it was Hillary’s emails. […]
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In my memories of the baseball diamond behind my elementary school, it never rains. I’m sure it did—this was deep within California’s drought years, but there must have been muddy infields and cancelled practices. What I remember, though, is all sun and dry dugout dirt floating up to irritate our eyes and grazed elbows. We […]
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I learned my grandfather died in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, somewhere between Los Angeles and Tokyo. A text arrived in the plane’s whirring, slipping past all the miles of metal and clouds to glow quietly on my screen. I was sipping green tea that tasted like warm hay. The flight attendant paused, scanning […]
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A mosaic of vibrant magnets covered my family’s off-white refrigerator. My eyes traced the mural from the I ❤ NYC sticker in the top-right corner of the door, down to the Honolulu postcard, and past the handle to family photos in Beijing, evoking memories that felt like fairy tales. As a kid, I believed our […]
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Dear Father, Why did you keep taking me to your childhood home? Now that you’re dying, no one else wants to go there with me. My mother drives through in a rush, too spooked to stop more than a moment. Decrepit but still standing, then vacant, covered in weedy trees and vine, now cleared again, […]
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lies its twisted self around the circumference of my brain. My age: eleven. The age I wished to be when he tumbled from earth to heaven: ten. Or twenty. Or thirty. Or any number beginning or ending with the number zero, because to the ancient Greeks “zero” is a non-number.“Nothing.” μηδέν. The number one (I […]
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I embrace my child with tears streaming down my face, attempting and failing to muffle the hitching sound of my sobbing. “Are you sad?” she questions guilelessly, squirming out of my grasp to gaze up at my face. She is not yet five, and without enough lived experience to have witnessed me in the depths […]
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Overture in Ow Major If my pain had a sound, it would be the pulsing hum of an MRI machine. I went into one when I was ten, maybe eleven. I’d been in and out of Children’s Hospital appointments for nearly a year, diagnosed with minor scoliosis for two, and stuck with doctors scratching their […]
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We don’t talk about it. We take long walks in lake effect snow. I push my gloves into my coat pocket. Small penance for big slights. Your face is for the sun. You inhale the crisp air. You stop to watch a great heron skip across a mildly frozen lake. Across the lake somebody is […]
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“She dresses up like that to go out for noodles?” —an off-screen character in In the Mood for Love As we passed all of the extravagant wallpaper designs, including an art deco print of cheetahs, a not so subtle homage to the dim sum lounge’s name, the host grandly gestured to the booth and chair-table […]
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My daughter Lily disappears into a cardboard box and emerges as a terrifying T-Rex. She attacks, roaring, and eager to eat me, her own human mother. Neighbors on the sidewalk observe us, me, an Asian woman and her child, playing chase in the yard. To them, we are plainly a pair. They don’t know I […]
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(content warning: mental illness, suicide, body horror) The first track of Isaac Hayes’s Hot Buttered Soul plays in the background. “Walk on By” is a cover song; subsequently it has been sampled repeatedly: Damn they trynna stick me for my paper. I can’t go to sleep. I can’t shut my eyes. But my technique is […]
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Thanksgiving is not the place to get naked and unashamed. That was Eden, and we are several miles away. Thanksgiving is the place to deliver chrysanthemums coaxed into the shape of poultry. As you hand your aunt the flower turkey, distance crimps carefully. It is as guarded and dry as her smile in its separate […]
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I think I am drinking spit. I can feel it on my tongue, just that bit thicker than water, sliding down my throat like egg white. Gabrielle is banging her palm on the sticky table, repeating the start of a drinking chant we all know, in a tone that is slightly too aggressive for 7am. […]
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I arrive first. The server seats me by the window but I know you like to be tucked into the fold of the café, so I ask for a high table in the back. I glimpse your tan skin at the door. Your green eyes find mine. We smile. You pull me into a hug […]
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Lately I have stopped being able to recognize my face as a sum of its parts. When I stand in front of the mirror, pinching soft skin between accusatory fingers, the face that looks back is unrecognizable, each feature isolated like pieces of a disjointed puzzle. My reflection smiles at me and parts her lips, […]
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Nearly halfway to 14 and I’ve slept with more men than my parents Pat and Steve would ever care to count. I know them by their names in my head, where the safety I can sometimes make happen looks like a sort of glow: outside, they have to be the Mom and Dad who get […]
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Content warning: Mentions of sexual harassment and rape. No one warned me about boys. In Grade 6, I was ill-prepared when a group of them took my backpack and tossed it in the boy’s bathroom. My textbooks and notebooks were wet from whatever was leaking under the urinals. They locked me in as soon as […]
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This concrete-jungle had been painted green for my arrival, which was in great contrast to the sandy oasis of the Phoenix valley that I previously called home. Rumbling over the Whitestone Bridge, I caught the first glimpses of the Manhattan skyline delicately balanced on top of the shattered-glass East River. The taxi swerved around highway […]
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Walking into my dorm room, a wave of freshmen that could capsize a navy liner. We sprawl about, making use of every available mattress and pillow after most of us spent the last four hours at a function growing from strangers to strangers who are having a sleepover. Because my roommate is off skiing in […]
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In the sweltering Nashville summer, I’m wandering through the farmer’s market with my parents. In my mind, a Fall Out Boy Song is playing as my eyes skim the tables full of handcrafted goods. I notice a jewelry stand. Then, I see a leather bracelet, held together by black yarn, with a rainbow pattern embroidered […]
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I’ve been estranged from my parents for five years, and this is not the first time I have been estranged from them. In movies it is often a single event, a concrete conflict, addiction, or an unfortunate event that leads to estrangement. In my case, and I suspect in many cases, the problem is not […]
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The day I promised to love you forever, I’d spent my morning tending to a patient awaiting a heart transplant. His heart was failing, the left ventricle weak, baggy, sagging like the overstretched neck of a favorite old T-shirt, no longer able to contract enough to push adequate blood to organs and extremities. A colleague […]
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Chicken Hekka is a dish originating from the plantation era. It is a Hawaiian version of Japanese sukiyaki and is still popular today. Cook time: 5 generations and approximately 45 minutes Ingredients: 1. Boneless chicken breast 2. Dried Shiitake mushrooms 3. White planter elite to oust Queen Lili’uokalani 4. Canned straw mushroom 5. Long rice […]
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beloved(s)! plz clink ur glasses w/ me! today is my 25th birthday. today is always my last birthday. today is X-mas. today is Yom Kippur. today is Columbus Day. today is a day of celebration. how else to consider life w/o joy? no. ur probs right: the big dipper is scoopin all the stars 2nite […]
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In the city that birthed rebellion in the decade before my mother birthed me, I have built a home out of ruins. This city that burned itself and then rose from its own ashes has been my guide, showing me the way through the flame ignited by my own personal book of matches. This city, […]
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Little Sister The scene is Dad on a staircase. Yellow air. Sticky-sick sounds formulating. “He’s like an angel.” There was a banal frame, Macy’s-like, with husband, mother, daughter, son-brother. “It’s the white shirt.” There are screams. There is a mother clasping head between arms between legs and cracked-door. Legs and arms and matted hair. There […]
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My mother broke herself into so many pieces that when she glued herself back together there were some shards she would never find. One day, she decided to stop trying to fix herself and focus her attention on shaping someone else. So she adopted a baby from China. She would mold this child into a […]
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In north central Oklahoma, otherwise gorgeous with luscious hills and curiously red dirt, litter abounds: Styrofoam Chick-fil-A cups, empty cigarette packs, and, beginning in 2020, discarded face masks. I’d started a green neighborhood initiative in the small Oklahoma town that my now-wife and I called home. The goal was not only to pick up trash, […]
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It’s a very practical form of self-harm, I say reasonably. Sensibly. My voice is measured, even chipper. It’s free, easy, quiet, and leaves no physical trace…what more can you ask for? I sound like a salesperson on commission. You hate me for it. My grin grows wider without mirth, like a fox baring its fangs. […]
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Back when I was urging my heart to flow into slow circles, Grace parked her old, blue convertible across the street and met me at the front door of my apartment building. We stood there, smiled, moved into some sort of embrace we hadn’t fully formed, and I followed her back down the steps. She […]
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1 Mythology My mother emails me a study on the correlation between rain and depression. I email back and promise to be alert, hand over heart. I stay wary of it. I kill every cloud I see. In winter a storm lets itself in anyways, petulant, sticking to the roof of my mouth for nights […]
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Ever since Hu and Javed and I started making music together, I’ve been trying to tease apart whether Noor’s sense of humor is obligatory-host-dad, ingratiated-Midwestern-sarcastic, or something else entirely. It can’t possibly be Pakistani, can it? Late yesterday afternoon he greeted me with a stonefaced stare: “You are not welcome here.” He didn’t crack a […]
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It was that time of the year in my city. Thunderstorm. Heavy rainfall. Violent winds. Blackout. While it brings inconvenience to most, for me, it happens to be the best time of the year. Nothing to distract me from reading. No Internet, no Netflix, no one to ask me for tea making favours and no […]
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The red and purple lights that seep into the windows from the carwash infuses the atmosphere with a tantalizing tone, one that I am all too familiar with at this point in my life. Like any other 17-year-old high school junior, I am wired. I am antsy. I am using this opportunity as a mission […]
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Tacos de cabeza Beef head tacos. The love of your life. Only available in the morning. You have been eating tacos de cabeza since you were in your mother’s belly. You were born with tiny head tacos’ grease on your nose. There is a puestecito near the mercado in Obregón, Sonora. They were a few […]
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When I was four years old and learning to read, my born-again Christian grandfather gifted me a children’s bible. I was unimpressed by this offering because I couldn’t read but the illustrations remain in my mind thirty-five years later, especially the ones involving the gory demise of Jesus at the end of the book. “Who […]
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I pace the house looking for the dog, the ghost of the dog, the ghost of someone. The mother and dynasty and mausoleum I carry inside me. Something. It feels here but not, a muted anticipation, a phantom limb, when you brush the wall in the dark to hit the light switch you’ve struck a […]
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Inspired by ‘The Cool Girl Monologue’ (Gone Girl, 2014; Directed by David Fincher). I should’ve known that it wouldn’t work out between us. We were too different, too incongruous. And no matter what transpired among us, there was always one lingering question: were we ever truly in love? You fell for someone who never existed; […]
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Dear Mummiji, Your ink black hair parted in the middle like an open book of mysteries. Your marble-sized red bindi resting above your third eye, giving way to your fading brows the same haphazard shape as mine. Your diamond nose ring, glinting mischievously in the dusty morning light of Mumbai. Your puckered lips, one darker […]
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Missing Loaf-Middles If mangoes and melons and baby sisters have odes of their own, apples deserve a poem. So do apricots, bananas, and younger brothers, those very special extensions of you that are not quite you and never quite yours. They deserve words, those poemable slices of freshly-baked bread snuck out and gobbled whole that […]
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VAGABOND CITY 