Tag: Issue 15

  • Bad Mexican, Bad American

    I like football, ketchup on my scrambled eggs. My biggest sin, perhaps, is I speak English to my parents.   I’m a bad Mexican. Yet, I like carne asada over BBQ, Latina women who speak Spanish in my ear.   I root for México in soccer. I’m a bad American, too. I like Sunday morning…

  • i tell the ghost of carrie fisher the world is ending

    and she laughs. oh, baby—baby, this damn world’s been ending for damn ever. she plunks her translucent body down on your blank side of the bed. you, that other ghost, who did not come to comfort me. the mattress is memory foam and so does not register her weight, but if it wasn’t, it would:…

  • We Were Never Really Here

      For V   The clouds are flaking embers again, evergreens spraining their necks. Words reach my tongue and hatch into a swarm of robber flies. They wilt and crumble in the Holocene sun as it sets within me. Parking lot mountain range of snow, an orangely-lavender contrail that floats like an opposite spirit above…

  • A Camel to the Cooking Pot

    My husband Amir tells me, “better to have a tall man,” as he gets riz from the cupboard’s top shelf. His Kalashnikov’s under the sink. Bombs rattle the pots and pans. He rips open the ten-kilo sack. Who will cook for him tomorrow? Me, in his arms. dirt and motor oil stain his shirt. “How’d…

  • I wrestle with you

    but not in a sexy way / not in the way we used to / by which I mean the way / we might have / I remember us / only in the moments we touched / the concert at The Warhol / you stood close to me / as if it were crowded /…

  • Double Wide

    My grandma lives in a double-wide trailer on an acre of land her husband left her. My family lives a few hours south, but I don’t get along so well with my dad, so I’m spending time up here. She bought the doublewide from a family whose father died of throat cancer. They had to…

  • The Corpse Carriers

    All the girls in our town are assigned a corpse to carry once they’re old enough. It stays with you nearly forever, slung around your neck, or held in your arms, or somehow fastened to your body if you’re clever enough, or lucky enough to get help to do so. Boys don’t get corpses. They…

  • Nine Kinds of We

    1. At the end of Adrienne Rich’s poem “Transcendental Etude” a woman walks away from the argument and jargon in a room to sit alone in a kitchen turning in her lap/bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps. It is a kind of creating that isn’t about virtuosity, but care for the many-lived, unending/forms in…

  • Issue 15

    Issue 15