Issue 12

Every Month is Black History Month
By SUSAN STRAIGHT When my youngest daughter began her freshman year of high school, I said casually to her, “Do you ever see Christian?” She gave me an incredulous and dismissive look. She replied, “Why would I see him? He doesn’t go here. He’s probably not in school at all. He probably fried his brain dying his hair all those…
The Next Thief of Magadan
By VLADISLAVA KOLOSOVA The luxe door had cost them everything. Oak, with wooden lace. It gave the impression there was more behind it than: one bed, one couch, one cupboard, one telephone, one twenty-year-old TV set at full volume, and two eighty-three-year-old women. He was the seventh thief in the last two…
Rico Gatson: Selections
By RICO GATSON Introduction by David E. Little What was required was a new story, a new history told through the lens of our struggle. —Ta-Nehisi Coates They say there’s nothing harder than hitting a fastball. In America, clichés on the difficulty of sports abound. But how to describe the challenges of art? Like picking up a paintbrush and…
Virgil's Tattoo
By MAX FREEMAN Virgil got his tattoo in Megara Around the time he knew that his great poem Must be destroyed. A reckless decision. In Rome, he would have to hide it always. The shop was tidy, the tattoo artist A barbarian who spoke Greek badly. The poet had secretly wanted one For years. When he passed gladiators In public…
Wythe County in July
By DOLORES HAYDEN Stare... —Walker Evans’ advice to young artists So here’s a board-and-batten house— a wall of planks with ragged ends behind the windows’ splitting sills— and here five siblings form a row straggling across the wooden porch. The boy frowns down and looks away, his sisters…
The Blue Hat
By WYATT TOWNLEY The forecast was wrong. The bald guy smiling but wrong. The blonde with swinging hair wrong. Their software, their reading of currents. Rain, they said, rain for days. We wore the wrong shoes, postponed the garden, the walk in the woods. Overhead: blue—and red tailed hawks make their arcs; sun…
Mowing
By ELIZABETH POLINER That summer, even before she took up mowing, Suzanne was doubting herself, an uncertainty that set in when her husband began to notice the Mandlebrauns’ oldest daughter, Alison, soon to finish college. Alison, who lived in the only other house on their riverside lane, was home in Middle Haddam for the summer and came by to play…
The Drop
By CLARE BEAMS The church ladies were having coffee in the living room of the Baker house when Martin Williams delivered his parachute to Lily Baker, his bride. Only some of the church ladies could really have been there, but in retellings they all claimed seats. They allowed one another this. A natural desire, to be part of the story.…
The Common Statement
By JENNIFER ACKER Mostly, Les gossips and writes about girls. One’s “a real peach” and another “darn nice.” Poor Esther has legs like parentheses—she “must have been born with a barrel between her legs.” Then there’s Mildred, who’s darn good-looking but too biting: “Sarcastic is no word. That’s complimenting her.” Les gets a little revenge when he sees her at…
Pegasus
By VALERIE DUFF Iron mallet, shield of glass. Our genesis a crucible of gas and condensation shot straight through the aorta that took on color, luster, gorgon dreds when one of us reversed and sampled godhead. To be a wilderness, unstable viable Medusa spawned right there, shut down to rock and filled the holding chamber. Pulled particles developed mass, insisted…
Tell Me, Please
By EMILY CHAMMAH I wouldn’t say that Omar is my best friend, because I like to think we are closer than that, that there is something bringing us together more than any friendship could. While it is true that he is my cousin, I never feel as connected to the others—to Muhammad or Nour or Ahmed or Anais—or even to…
Things We Hold in Common
By ELVIS BEGO The first time I came upon Raley was in a volume of Edith Wharton’s correspondence—a short, scabrous note he wrote from Venice in the winter of 1908. When I later read his Drowned City—one of those belated NYRB Classics that seem to appear out of a hidden crack in the library of Babel—I found its rooftop phantasmagoria…
The Summerbook of Giyorgis Balthus
By ISHION HUTCHINSON Giyorgis Balthus: 1321-1400 1. We surged in the moon-darkened room, between counter-actions, naked, our spectres clocking the grey-scale before morning, flayed and turning in our recently broken garden, all clay, our peonies, ghosted, nodding, shall abide, delicate as this loam-stillness, our own flesh and blood, sharpened to brighten and alter the gloom. 2. Because we passed with…
The Little Blue Purse
By PETER SCHMITT It was a little blue purse she had asked for, my mother, age four, when her father called from the Mayo Clinic. With a silver chain— and he had somehow found one in a pawnshop in Rochester, and if he weren’t so tired— from the radium and the transfusions, from the talk of white blood cells, from…
Thirty-Two Days Without Alcohol
By SERHIY ZHADAN Translated by OSTAP KIN A good day is a day without bad news. Sometimes everything turns out fine— no news, no fiction. Three thousand steps to the supermarket frozen chickens like dead stars gleam after death. All you need is mineral water, I only need my mineral water. Execs, like frozen chickens, are hatching the eggs of…
Passing Strange
By W. RALPH EUBANKS All thinking Southerners, at some point, find their minds at war with their hearts, a battle that often ends with the heart claiming victory. It is this triumph of the heart that landed me, a black expatriate Mississippian, back in my home state again. Yet returning to Mississippi after nearly forty years, albeit temporarily, as a…
Seventh-Day Adventist Kids are Pathfinders, Not Scouts
By ERICA DAWSON The counselors told us to fucking go to bed; but, earlier they’d taught us one more Christian song— It only takes a spark to get a fire going— and we sang loud as we could. And long. Collected pitch enough for Angel and, no doubt, just good enough for all the coming grab ass,…
Santa Anita
By SEAN BERNARD Living with Ricky is fine. The things you accept—they're small things. Like the way he kicks off his shoes in the hallway at the end of the workday, leaving them there for you to nearly break your ankle on when you have to pee in the middle of the night. He has a point: if you know…
The Women
By SERHIY ZHADAN Translated by OSTAP KIN —Tell me about your new girlfriend, about the one you’re living with now. What’s between you two? —The air is between us. I just live with her the way small children live with their fear. Here’s what’s between us: her bizarre routes, apples and wine, all her Protestantism, clothes she carries in her…
Mary, with Swag
By ERICA DAWSON I deserve a steed for this. This ride. The sex that didn’t need bodies. No straining hip craned nearly out its socket. Not one flex. Seduction. There’s a way to lick your lip without moving your tongue. You have to get down on your knees. Your hands will get dirty. The rain on April grass is warm.…
A Gift Horse
By TIMOTHY LIU Her hands kept on working their way into my pants even after the wedding toast—the evening merely an excuse for a gift horse crashing through the stables of a barn a midget had set on fire, my mother clothed in nothing but safety matches struck on her teeth as she colored in my moon with pieces of…
The Noises
By J. D. MCCLATCHY My friend with the brain tumor—a grisly glioma Surgeons can’t get to the bottom of—that on one side Of his head presses transmitters on the other, hears A constant, streaming waterwheel of voices and music, Slopping pails drawn up from who knows where Each of us has reservoired it…
Tum Ab'aj
By HUMBERTO AK'ABAL Translated by LOREN GOODMAN In my town there’s a big rock called Tum Ab’aj. The sun and the moon take care of it. It’s not a mute rock, it’s a drum of stone. It’s covered with a fluff we refer to as toad shit. A road, a river and the rock in the middle. Those who don’t…
And Then It Rains
By KAREN CHASE See the trace of someone’s hand in the shorn branches, the tangle of trees past the flat lawn. The composed yard— fence, wall, dark shape of cypress, vanishing elm form. All the ways we shape and carve— yards, religion, plans, sonnets, villanelles, seasons, days of the week, times for meals,…
Malbolge
By ROBERT BAGG We go through life regretting our mistakes. One savage quip that can’t be taken back, one breach of a friend’s trust is all it takes to wrench a lifelong friendship out of whack. Some people have an enviable knack for sensing…
Nativity Scene
By KEVIN O'CONNOR Strange you came onto me at Children’s Mass, standing in back, minding my unbelief, as Thomas doubted physical return. Eyes darting like fish and perfume smelling of desperation, you must have fantasized that I would recognize you after years in the parish Church where we were baptized. “Come here and touch my breasts,” you said later as…
Looking for Ice
By RALPH SNEEDEN I. At the boarding school where I teach, my campus residence bears a plaque with the name of an English teacher who drowned after falling through ice. He had been skating on the river after the year’s first deep freeze, which had been followed by a snowstorm. I was told that once his pickup hockey game had…
11 Warnings: How to Avoid Talking Politics at Parties
By DENISE DUHAMEL & JULIE MARIE WADE Adult Supervision Recommended When your partner comes home with you for the first time, try to prepare her. Explain how they still see you as a child: cake and candles, streamers and balloons, bubblegum and colored pencils as parting gifts. Though you’re twenty-three, your father insists, “You won’t be grown up in my book until…
The Afterlife of Stars
By JOSEPH KERTES Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too. —Rainer Maria Rilke On October 24, 1956, the day I turned 9.8, my grandmother came to take me out of school in Budapest’s 6th District. We were in the middle of reviewing decimal points because of a mistake a classmate named Mary had made. Other parents and grandparents were…
The Storytelling Animal
By ANNA BADKHEN We are in the market square in Djenné, in central Mali. Ali the Griot holds court on a low wooden stool by the pharmacy. He chants: “The Fulani came from Ethiopia: first the Diallos, then the Sows, then the Bâs. The Bâs had the most cattle; their cows are white; they give the most milk; from that…
Leave the Child
By AKWE AMOSU When the storm’s coming, you can feel it. The atmosphere’s tense, quivering the leaves, hot, damp air close up to your face, the cloud doubling and darkening, metallic grey, sucking in the light. There’s a portent in the frenzy of birds and the cat’s retreat into the bottom of the clothes cupboard. Sometimes night falls and everything…