Photo by Rick Harris Such sounds. Your mother in the kitchen over a pot of stuffed cabbage, crying, Istenem, istenem, istenem and you answering her back, There is no God God is dead he’s dead my brother is dead. What should I say about your brother in the attic with a gun? He left you […]
Photo by Doug Beckers Bone by bone, she remembered what it was like to change from body into light, that the month of March had had no time for grief and tore up her belly until there were just black plums there like ancient letters split in two— al-eph, b-eyz, gi-ml, da-led. She recalled she […]
Photo by Tamaki Sono In the second week of medical school, we’re given cadavers. We name ours Aberforth, and I tell myself I’m prepared as I’ll ever be. The classroom is underground. The halogen-lit air fills with the smell of formaldehyde and other chemicals I don’t know the names of. “I know you’ve all been […]
Photo by Alexander Fink When my great-uncle died, his children held the wake in the old house, the house he had grown up in, inherited, and condemned in his will. He wanted his house’s story to end when his did. This was a selfishness I understood. I’d read somewhere that no structure is ever really […]
Photo by chessboard35 Teeth, glamorous teeth. Whiter than white: glint. How can you call a color a word? Flimsy netting of the exuberant verb of it— all swan and longing and snow. But we were talking about teeth, how I stole one from my first-grade class, decomposing in a dirt-colored glass of Coke next to […]
Photo by Theo Crazzolara Girl A, always Girl A, dives headlong into her own skin as she steps into a vehicle of light, skin rushing to catch up, closing enclosing her, in within the steps the box she carves out the vertical column of space that is hers, shadow edging close into the vertical column […]
Photo by Stephen Kruso In summer, its trees blaze with color, their fingers spilling over the tenants. There is a smoker, our fixture, his cough a deep chime. One, two. His second-floor watch is consistent but punctuated. There are children, creatures of the afternoon, DayGlo bicycles lurching forward with half-flat white tires. Sometimes, I come […]
Photo by romana klee The photographer’s studio is on wheels, hitched to a pickup truck, and parked today beside a Dallas tattoo parlor. At one end of the room, she has placed a wooden stool and three lights on adjustable stands. At the other end is a door to a tiny darkroom where she prepares […]
Photo by baldeaglebluff The first time Maria ever spoke to me directly, we were somewhere over the North Atlantic on a red-eye to eastern Europe. “Don’t mess around with any Brits without seeing a passport first. He might say he’s a delegate, or an important businessman, but he could easily be some Eton kid there […]
We spotted our dessert next to the register: el pan covered in cracked pink icing and shaped like la concha; flat pan made of concentric circles and bent to look like una oreja; oven-dark pan shaped like a pig, los marranitos, the favorites of mi mamá.