At many stages throughout my life, I often wondered: If I were the same age as my dad, would we have been friends? I knew my dad loved me, but did he like me? Whenever I cleared my mom and sister out of the living room by letting a particularly loud one rip, Dad would grin and say “Like father...
“The one you would choose: Were you led then by him?” “What longing, O Yaar, is controlled in real time?” —Agha Shahid Ali (Ghazal) i dreamt of tulips today they opened their mouths in a yawn the kind that engulfs the sun in its vacuous mouth like a little hurricane; the sort of yawn that could...
Reviewed by seeley quest Trynne Delaney, the half-drowned (Metatron Press, 2022), 144 pp., $18. Near the end of Trynne Delaney’s first book, the half-drowned, comes a thematic question: What reality might hit after the end of belonging? The speculative fiction novella is set in a liminal future...
But how could it not, when you used the precise alphanumeric sequence needed to land your words in my inbox? Not what you meant? Let’s begin again. Sarcasm arrives too easily when I’m nervous. Yes, I am well. As in I am doing well. As in I remember to steady myself with deep breathing when...
Content warning: this story depicts domestic violence and has discussions of sexualized violence. The Johnny Cash records. Well, we left behind all the records, along with that battered record player in the teal case. All of us, when we were little, liked to play with the metal clasp on that case...
before lockdown i dreamt that a serpent tried to kill me. so i tattooed it to my forearm in the place of my neck, a vision of black scales & black eyes blazed alight beneath the red of an imaginary sun. when an alien summer leaves you hypomanic it makes perfect sense to carve nightmare...
Reviewed by Melinda Roy Brian Francis, Missed Connections: A Memoir in Letters Never Sent (McClelland & Stewart, 2021), 240 pp., $24.95. I am a late bloomer. I came out as queer at 32 and was diagnosed with ADHD two years later. There were signs of both, which I can see when I look back; my...
I am you in your jewel-domed reading room, I am you in your kayak skimming. —Phyllis Webb The sky was inverted. I called you in the bare yellow night. I am you against the river of clouds, I am you in an energy current shaking down the kitchen walls, you in the contrapuntal stream of two trees...
“Two Warehouse Workers, Not Smoking” was inspired by the short story “Two Nurses, Smoking,” (The New Yorker, 2020) by David Means, and the investigative journalism of The New York Times. The sign was written in half a dozen languages in order for its meaning to not be mistaken: A Smoke-Free...
