recent writing
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One True Friend
“‘So,’ he said. ‘I guess this is how it’s gonna be. But there’s one condition. You can’t run off on me, okay? If you’re in, you’re in for good. Got that?’ She blew her breath out of her nose and closed her eyes.” In Mike Ducak’s story, “One True Friend,” a scarred man faces the possible loss of the only living being who has been healing him.
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from “What’s Good?”
“[H]ello, poetry / passing by,” Jason Koo writes in “Be Less,” one of two sections from his latest long poem, “I’m not sure where you will go but you / are always there.” His lines are plaintive and comic, conversational and grave, as he seeks, amid the daily mayhem of parenting young kids, to rekindle poetry’s “bolting birth of a beyond.” Here’s proof that he does.
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Revolutionary
Asya Graf’s autobiographical essay chronicles a journey to the past that kindles hope for the future: “I find myself summoning an ancestor […]: a phone call, a voice on the other end, decades and countries converging in that moment of contact. The mythic ghost in my family turning into an elderly woman who’s vividly alive. And who knows a thing or two about being a revolutionary.”
from the archive
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An Arsenal of Sand
“Anger in our family was like the water: it had to go somewhere. Rise up, sink down, or burst everywhere at once.” An excerpt from Angela Palm’s Riverine: A Memoir from Anywhere but Here.
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Amy Jorgensen: an Interview
Amy Jorgensen talks with Debra Klomp Ching about Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue.
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The Cats of Old San Juan
“The cats are here because of the rats. / The rats are here because of the Americans. / The Americans were here because of the Spanish. / The Spanish were here because fuck the Spanish.” Combining the force of logic with bitter irony and sharp humor, a new poem from David M. de León tracks the confusions of Puerto Rico’s colonial past and present.