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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The only thing my mother says that I believe is that I see what I want to see. You do, too. And so does she, but I don’t know if she believes what she says. I know this is true because she refuses to see objects as they really are, how they become when no […]
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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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Submit Your Child’s Birthday Cake Request Below: The Child’s Name It would serve you better to know she’s like herself to be called Bluey Glooey, the queen of the scrappy toads. The ones she loves to chase around the pond of her grandmother’s house. Bluey because being blue is what makes her the queen, she […]
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It isn’t really a hobby, thumbing off the flower heads of annual potted plants in my neighbourhood. It’s more of a habit, borderline ideological. You know, like plucking your eyebrows or hiding your nipples. It’s just that they sit there all summer long, these flowers, without any roots to look forward to, useless when they […]
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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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after Ryan Van Meter’s “Things I Want To Say To You On Our First Date But Won’t” That as a small child I thought dating in high school would be unattainable—and maybe that was because my sole romantic exposure involved the novels of Jane Austen and the associated television programs, but still. That the eight-year-old […]
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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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Since my dad died thirteen days before my bachelorette party, I have no choice but to bring him on the trip. Before I set off for Cancun, I pack all my white bikinis and show my fiancé my dad’s soul, which I’ve managed to place into a silver clamshell-shaped necklace. I kiss my fiancé goodbye, […]
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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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A minor deity loiters in the parking lot outside the liquor store on Mannheim, where my ward works nights, scanning bottles of cheap whiskey and glossy packs of flavored cigarillos. This deity is a cagey beast. Upon his head he wears a crown of gnashing pitbull maws, all chomping and growling; the snouts are bruised […]
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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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Redwoods have a propensity to sing. Not in a melodic, dictated line, but in painterly, impressionist swaths. They hum as they reach for one another with outstretched roots beneath the Earth. In a crescendo, blankets of pines stretch for God. Holy rainwater spirits their growth. This concerto they embody wholly. I began, prior to my […]
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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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When I was fifteen, I bought a book about Camille Claudel from Everything’s-a-Dollar. With tax, it actually cost $1.96, which seemed like false advertising. Books from that store were always a risk, but I was always willing to take risks on books. This one paid off. I became obsessed. Obsessed with Camille’s exhausted and knowing […]
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“Despite what he had written in his letter, Noel’s separation from his family would always be geographical. He spent the remainder of his wealthy life dining alone.” The back cover folded over the final page and turned the work into a solid, white brick. An item for production. A large wet stamp was stomped on […]
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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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After the Lunar New Year, I take the plane from Beijing to New York City to Phoenix, where the gingery dialect of cordialities is sloughed, like chili pepper, from my tongue. Here in the stretch of uncharted Arizona canyon, there is an astounding dust-filled silence: wind whistling across undulating tiers of limestone, and the soft […]
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Mansoura Ez-Eldin is an Egyptian award-winning author of ten books. Her book, Walks in Shanghai, received the Ibn Battuta Prize for travel literature 2021; her novel, Emerald Mountain, received the award of the best Arabic novel in 2014 from Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF). In 2009, she was selected for the Beirut39 as one of […]
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Translated from the Arabic by Khaled Rajeh At first, they appeared timid. They wore black, walked slowly, and gazed at everything around them, as if measuring the air with their eyes. We only took note of them after they started moving in groups of five or more. With the same calm, the same intent look, […]
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Her mother told her to look after their garden. She gathered the small flowers and laidthem next to each other. She carefully kissed every flower like they meant the world toher. She gave them names. The garden was her everything, but the bombs took it away.She drew flowers on red papers, thinking her family gave […]
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The old woman sat on some front steps, playing catch with herself with a bright orangeball, tossing it high with her right hand, catching it in her left, tossing it less high with her left,catching it in her right. A man, pausing to light a cigarette, looked at her and laughed. She tossedthe ball, caught […]
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I was never meant to carry these twins with me. They sprung up on me, latching onto me like apair of weights I couldn’t stop lifting. Baggy clothes and sweaters three sizes up used to concealthem, but I’m well into the stages where there’s no hiding them anymore. Now that they’reshowing, people are beginning to […]
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I got on a steamboat run by a whistling mouse in a navy gray hat and overalls. No gloves. His name escapes me. Apparently, it’s under trademark. He’s still under trademark. Not copyright. Or, at least, his likeness with the red pants and white gloves and mustard yellow shoes is under trademark. So. No. Gloves. […]
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I made a cake. It looked beautiful. Not one of those overly neat, complicated fondant things that used to be in vogue; instead, a tastefully askew cake with real flowers stuck onto it. Wabisabi. I suppose I could have just eaten it myself and refused to share it. But, sharing is caring! Up it went, […]
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You are a grown-up, so you fill your new bathtub with Legos and Coca Cola and go to your kitchen—which is also the bedroom and the living room and the hallway—and fetch the bowl of cookie dough. You sit in your stew of sugar and plastic and wolf down the dough in fistfuls. You let […]
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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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Once upon a time there was a great and powerful king. When he first assumed control of the kingdom, after his father the previous king passed away, life for the people wasn’t so good. They went hungry most of the time, food and clean water were scarce, and nice houses only existed in dreams. The king’s subjects were […]
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I live in a temple, and you live in a house. When you visit me, you run slender fingers across my shrine. I don’t know how to respond to this. I’ve been alone for three hundred years and I’m dusty and small. I want to ask you to stop kissing my feet but the words […]
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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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IMAGE NO. 1: Alt Text: Picture of the beach. At the top center of the image is an airplane that is about to land at the airport. Directly under it is a black sun that is rising over some hilly islands that block the view into the open ocean. At the bottom of the image […]
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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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It starts with crickets. We lie in the forest and she sings about colors. Silver and purple at twilight, rubies of emerald glowing. There is nothing to back her voice, only crickets. The words echo and the moon fills up her lungs. Sunlight comes in shafts during the day, she reminds us as we watch […]
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A girl, let’s call her Fashion, invited me over to meet her hamster. The hamster lived in a large clear plastic box, like a large storage container, but it had no top. At first, this startled me. Where was the top? Then I remembered hamsters couldn’t fly. This hamster lived in its plastic house without […]
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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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I. When your ex-boyfriend asks you to bake his wedding cake, say yes. It’s not about the money, although he will offer you a heaping mound of cash. He will spot you through the frosted storefront windows. Don’t make eye contact until you hear the door open. Pretend not to see him even though he […]
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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: violence, self-harm Honey said holding onto memory is like trying to grasp water with spread fingers. She told me to hold on to the sweet ones, to turn my mind into cupped palms before they leak from the gaps of my fingers. If you remember anything, remember this: hold on, hold on, she’d […]
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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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The blow-up castle blooms like a ghost in their backyard. It’s bubble gum pink. Mara’s boyfriend can’t see it, gives her a look like not now, please when she points out the kitchen window. His mother is here for Christmas. They’ve removed certain books from their shelves, have taken down Mara’s paintings of naked women […]
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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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When Carla woke between them on Saturday as a small fish, flopping and gasping under the duvet, they decided to put her in the bathtub while they figured out how to get her back. They argued for a while over what temperature the water should be. Lorna said cold and Alex said lukewarm. Actually no, […]
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Undertaker was certain he had a quarter somewhere. But even if he managed to find the dull, ridged coin, he was unsure whether it was appropriate to tip the bag boy who ceremoniously carried groceries to Undertaker’s Scream-Mobile. In this particular case, the young man’s head was not even visible over the towering stack of […]
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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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In a modern-day miracle, one of my friends fell out of a tree and missed the ground, swooping up into the sky like a kite cut free of its strings. One of my friends tweeted oh my god oomf fell out of a tree but before she hit send, she got distracted by a TikTok […]
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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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VAGABOND CITY 