By Kailash Srinivasan In Karol Bagh, New Delhi, the streets are narrow, crammed with low-rise houses, people and bicycles and the housewives prefer buffalo milk to cows’. You’re Bala, you’re twelve and your hands are soft, your school uniform is white and boring, and your handwriting is right-slanted and cursive. You live with your grandma, who perhaps hasn’t seen a…
By Lisbeth Coiman I love you in Spanish because in my mouth your name sounds thick like honey A slow drip down my thighs Each vowel open accented marking the syllables like a poem in Braille My fingers sliding softly on your chiseled biceps with dexterity on the darkness of your skin The rhotic erres roll from the…
By Adaora Raji When sand flies with the whirlwind and lands in my eyes, I do not close my eyes because I know that if I do, they may never open again. I am not afraid when a dust devil takes a fierce swipe at my face. I am not afraid of the rattlesnakes that hide in the sand or…
By Jed Myers To have breathed all these days and crossed another winter’s start— to have ridden this rolling pebble through the light’s narrows again! To weather the long dark falling on toward the chance of skunk cabbage clean out of the mud— I spotted a hummingbird poking the shrubs for buds in the lean sun, days past the solstice,…
By Miguel Murphy St. Jerome Writing (1605), Caravaggio Memento mori as apology for assaulting the lawyer Pasqualone, earning him Papal favor! There, in his brow, not Lear, let’s say, but Hamlet, if he’d survived to annotate his latest on guts, tears, and semen: Some Notes on Treatment as Prevention, in which he’d snigger, Don’t eat the malus. pate. What…
By Aïcha Martine i ask for the room by the window they say, honey, you know this isn’t a hotel, right? but kindly, like i just don’t understand things yet i heard doctors don’t have a sense of humor, that if they do, it is phone-cord extra-twisted so i don’t ask about the “cleaning fee” and the…
Tod Goldberg is a busy man. When he’s not running UC Riverside’s Palm Desert MFA program, he’s recording one of two podcasts, KCOD Coachella FM’s Open Book with author Maggie Downs and Literary Disco with writer Julia Pistell and actor Rider Strong; or he’s writing essays and fiction; or he’s making audiences laugh and gasp at literary festivals. Goldberg is genuinely curious about what makes people…
NPR’s Ari Shapiro talks with Stephen Graham Jones, an American author and a member of the Blackfeet tribe, about his new book, The Only Good Indians. ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: Stephen Graham Jones writes horror novels, and his latest starts with a provocative reworking of an old saying. The title is “The Only Good Indians.” STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES: The only good…
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. (SFWA) is pleased to announce that Nalo Hopkinson (born December 20, 1960) has been named the 37th Damon Knight Grand Master for her contributions to the literature of science fiction and fantasy. The Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award recognizes “lifetime achievement in science fiction and/or fantasy.” Hopkinson joins the Grand…
By Sean Cho A. and everyone else followed. It was December and the trees were bare and unrecognizable. I welcomed the Canadian geese to my back porch with stale rye bread. My past self used to howl for this and that but I tamed him with daily meetings, ugly proclamations, and long prayers. My body has been silent in…