The Burn
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Month: March 2021
The Night Market
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A Dreamlike Song, translated from the Chinese by Michael Day
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The Cities Dissolve, and the Earth Is a Cart
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After God, Fear Women
While Mr. Osagie slept, his wife, Maria, lay in chains at the foot of the bed, where he’d kept her for three days now. She’d tried to wrest herself free on the first night, the chains grating and scarring her …
Eloghosa Osunde is a Nigerian writer and visual artist. An alumna of the Farafina Creative Writing Workshop, the Caine Prize Workshop, and the filmmaking and screenwriting programs at New York Film Academy, her short stories have been longlisted for the Writivism Short Story Prize and published in The Paris Review, Catapult, and Berlin Quarterly. Osunde was awarded a 2017 Miles Morland Scholarship and is a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow. Her debut work of fiction, VAGABONDS!, will be published by Riverhead Books in 2021.
Orange Crane
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Kazim Ali’s books encompass multiple genres, including poetry, fiction, essay, memoir, and translation. He is currently a professor of comparative literature and creative writing at the University of California, San Diego. His newest books are a volume of three long poems titled The Voice of Sheila Chandra (Alice James Books, 2020) and a nonfiction book, Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water (Milkweed Editions, 2021).
My Mother’s Gowns
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At some point a few months after my mother’s death I’d become edgy at home, slipping into argumentative fits followed by apology and abjection. I didn’t understand the pain and weakness in my arms. I’d been sleeping only a …
Debra Nystrom has published four books of poems, Night Sky Frequencies (Sheep Meadow Press, 2016); Bad River Road (2009) and Torn Sky (2003), both from Sarabande Books; and A Quarter Turn (Sheep Meadow Press, 1991). Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Slate, The American Poetry Review, Narrative, Conjunctions, and Yale Review, among others. She teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Virginia.
In Paradise
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 …
Susanne Antonetta’s most recent books are her nonfiction study of spiritualism, physics, and consciousness studies The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here (Ohio State University Press: 21st Century Essays, 2021) and novel Entangled Objects (Slant Books, 2020). Forthcoming from Counterpoint is another nonfiction work, The Devil’s Castle (2022). Awards include a New York Times Notable Book, an American Book Award, a Library Journal Best Science Book, a Pushcart prize, and others. Antonetta’s work has appeared in the New York Times, The Independent, Orion, The New Republic, and many journals and anthologies. She co-authored the nonfiction text Tell It Slant (McGraw Hill, 2004) and is editor of the Bellingham Review.
A Terror Felt Rather Than Seen
In Just Us: An American Conversation, Claudia Rankine’s latest collection of poems, hybrid essays, and photographs, she sets out to ask a random white man how he understands his privilege. I admit, as I read, I’m a mix of …
Julie Iromuanya is the author of Mr. and Mrs. Doctor (Coffee House Press, 2015), a finalist for several awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, among others. Her scholarly-critical work most recently appears in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism; Callaloo: A Journal of African American Arts and Letters; and Afropolitan Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020). She is an assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies in the program in creative writing at the University of Chicago and affiliate faculty of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. She is at work on a second novel, “A Season of Light.”
