Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world-wilderness. Let there spring, Gentle One, from its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the harvest wonderful. (Let the ears …
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The first time I saw Salim, the weather report called it one of Karimnagar’s hottest summers. Streets bore silence like a curfew. Cows belched and jutted out their tongues for moisture. The ice cream vendor rolled his cart into the …
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When a bolt of lightning falls in love
with an old woman, sex is reinvented
as the world’s first toaster oven.
When lightning falls in love with a middle-
aged woman, lightning gives
birth to an electric guitar. …
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Poetry
Chronicles on Disappearance; It Is Sad to See a Horse Sleeping; Phantom Limb; & Displaced Distance as a Red Berry
Phantom Limb
after Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”
The truth is, let’s say, that the tin soldier did not fall in love
with the paper-doll ballerina. He fell in love with his missing limb.
Let’s hold …
PREFACE
WhateverWordsworth: Dear Reader is the Poet. The poet is above all a reader. Poetry is nothing more than hysterical citation. A love affair with the bust I’m drawing in college: I’ve made too soft the edges, and my teacher …
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Poetry
Beginner’s Astrology for Anarchist Jurisdictions in a Pandemic; 17 Days (Piano & a Microphone 1983); Sisyphus Says Relax; Nine Twenty-Nine Twenty-Twenty; & My Face in a Jar by the Door
Beginner’s Astrology for Anarchist
Jurisdictions in a Pandemic
They are a nation without sense, there is no discernment in them.
—Deuteronomy 32:28
The stars are further away. The flicker we see from them
been. The pin drops above …
Interview
An Education in Georgia, Then and Now: A Conversation with Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Calvin Trillin (moderated by Valerie Boyd, with an introduction by Lisa Bayer)
INTRODUCTION
In January 1961 Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes walked through the Arch, the iconic cast iron entryway to the University of Georgia campus, to enroll in classes, thus ending (per court order) 176 years of whites-only education at the …
Read MoreGo Hyunjin graduated from college, took a job as a team secretary at an insurance firm, and got married. The man she married was an actuary. Hyunjin wasn’t responsible for his division, but they worked on the same floor, so …
Read MoreI.
My madrina and I right away got a truckload of watermelons from a neighboring rancho, to keep us hydrated for the two months we’d be working. We—me being a twelve-year-old boy but strong like a freaking tiger homie, she …
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