When I was young and a good listener, a man told me he had lost his soul.
We sat on a strip of flattened grass outside the gas station I’d cranked my junker car into. I was waiting for a …
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Features
Special Feature
Itō Grows Ill, A Bird Transforms into a Blossom, and The Giant Trees Stay Unchanged, translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles
The new year slowly rolled around.
I stayed in Japan until the New Year. Dad’s helpers took three days of vacation for the holiday.
My husband returned to California. I flew back to Kumamoto with my youngest daughter, Aiko. Tons …
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Poetry
Happiness Is Very Hard (Is It); Dark Eye Circles; & God Knows Our Secrets, translated from the Taiwanese Mandarin by Nicholas Wong
Happiness Is Very Hard (Is It)
If pain secretly visits and sleeps over
In a zigzagging night
The body, like a habit-driven curve,
Will become bitter and stiff at the right time
Or it will try to lie flat …
[an excerpt from our Winter 2020 issue]
x.
A rhombus
turning
in a mind.
Fire
without a body,
eating:
air into air.
Looking
without a body.
Sun up.
x.
Reminder of a body,
thinking
READ A CONVERSATION WITH MAUD CASEY ABOUT THIS STORY HERE
The female hysteric represents an extraordinarily complicated type, of a completely particular and excessively versatile nature, remarkable for her spirit of duplicity, lying, and simulation. With an essentially perverse …
Read MoreOn the morning a week after Marcelina Ngonadi died, the four stooped sister-friends are pensive, knowing that Henrietta will be the next. As they look upon Marcelina’s gleaming casket with its gold handles and at her jewelry—silver earrings and a …
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She takes the test on her birthday.
“You’ll want a baby right away, won’t you?” he’d joked three months earlier, before their August wedding.
She’d demurred, but she knew she was lying. By November, there it is: a growth, a …
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There are diamonds inside
Although the Leonid meteor shower is not a rare occurrence, it is rare that I will be awake to see it. The news has been reporting that the meteor shower is coming, that a certain province …
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Special Feature 2
Surrounded by Peach Trees, President Clinton Speaks to My Fourth Grade Class [2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize Featured Finalist]
Back to School Day and my sister has been dead one year, ten months. This is how you get to the other side. We’ve been moving into a new world. When pressed against
your palm, the flesh of a good …
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