My father gave me my mother’s last name. Kirsch. A good, white-sounding name. I inherited nothing from him. I have gray eyes, light brown hair, skin that burns easily on trips to the gulf. They named me Chi, for the Cochiti pueblo, where my parents first met as part of a tour group. They didn’t name me Zara, my grandmother’s name. Zara was supposed to be an apology, because he missed his mother’s funeral, and because he was never going back to Libya, not after he tasted freedom, the sweat that beaded on my mother’s upper lip in New Mexico, and the fry bread they served at the pueblo, hot, drizzled in honey.
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Hair by Carmella Guiol
My hair speaks the language of conquistadors, the cousins of Columbus.
But it doesn’t tell the story of frijoles negro and yucca frita, ropa vieja and abuelas. My hair can’t tell you about my mother, age nine, boarding a plane with a doll in one hand and her brother’s palm in the other, destination unknown. My hair doesn’t tell you what my first words were after “Mami.”
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Life without Power Steering or How a Muslim Family Parks by Sam Pierstorff
The engine never failed on our mother’s rusty 1962 Studebaker Lark that drooled puddles of oil onto our driveway and shot black smoke from the tailpipe like an old musket, but most days I hoped it would so that my mother could shoot it dead like a crippled horse, and my brother and I could take the school bus instead.
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Ambrosia by Terrance Flynn
As a freshman in the mid-1980’s, I acquired a reputation no college student really wants—that of a good listener. Lacking a love life of my own to speak of, I was doomed to hear others go on about theirs. By second semester, I feared succumbing to the fate of a eunuch, which I imagined was a slow death caused by constant exposure to second-hand romance.
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Why Some Animals are Sexier than Others by Sarah Bates
This is not a poem about feelings.
This is an essay about six white rhinoceros. Six white rhinos and the misunderstanding of a mixtape.
This is not a poem about you making me a mixtape.
It’s an essay about the fastest routes to God. Frank Sinatra, the Bronx Zoo, and week old pots of coffee with the light still on. God.
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Death by Refrigerator by B. J. Hollars
When inventor Oliver Evans first conceived of his “refrigeration machine” in 1805, he never dreamed it could be a killer. He, much like Jacob Perkins and John Gorrie (both of whom would soon improve upon the design), dreamed simply of extending the preservation properties of food.
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Against Travel by Nathan Deuel
So deep was my sleep on a recent flight from Moscow to L.A.— a complete darkness, as if I was where I should be—and yet when I opened my eyes, seeing instead the hard light of a plane and not that place I suppose I hoped I had finally found, I clenched my teeth, it having become clear yet again that we were neither here nor there, and it was with a bit of anger, some disappointment, and not a little bit of regret that I found myself thinking again about the Rome of a day before as much as I was anticipating the heat of the California I’d see tomorrow, all the while attempting to forget a Phnom Penh that had started it all, not to mention the various cities in between that my wife and I had tried and failed over 15 years of roaming—this long and more or less continuous effort to make some place the place.
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Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting by Ashon Crawley
We are always asking the question of resource. Will there be enough bread, meat? Will there be enough milk, water? Will there be enough clothes, shelter? To ask the question of resource is to ask how we will be sustained, how we will be able to thrive in a world when access to most goods and services and solid earth – the disappearing of clean drinking water, the melting of ice caps causing a raised sea level, the possibility for cataclysmic earthquakes, deforestation of rainforests, the building of telescopes on Hawai’i sacred ground, for example – seems to be dwindling. Dwindling because of the political economy that organizes and structures lives under these American skies.
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The Generation with a Thorn in Its Side: Chican@ Youth and Morissey by Abigail J. Amabisca
From L.A. to Phoenix, and Albuquerque to Corpus Christi—Cinco de Mayo is no longer “Cinco de Mayo” but Cinco de Morrissey. Don’t believe me? Check your hashtags, mijo. Search #MozdeMayo or #CincodeMorrissey and you’ll find the internet is littered with photos of the ex-Smiths lead singer set to the backdrop of serapes and the Mexican flag. You’ll find Instagram photos and Tumblr sites filled with pompadours and forlorn looks. You’ll even find a podcast from NPR’s Alt Latino show, celebrating this newfound holiday. Por qué? Well, that’s a good question. How does an Irish man from Manchester with no Latino blood get incorporated into such a holiday?
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Self-Portrait as a 1970s Cineplex Movie Theater by Steve Fellner
It all starts with a single mystery.
And then another. And another. And then another.
I can still remember seeing my mother crying as Agatha’s ending credits rolled. My mother said, “My tragic flaw: I hold no mystery.”
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Mousetrap By Dustin Parsons
3. My new wife sends me out for mousetraps and peanut butter, and I don’t
think there is anyone that doesn’t know what we’re doing.
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Do You Have Any Fire? by Andrea Caswell
The first two words I could recognize were LUCKY and STRIKE. My grandfather always had the cigarettes in his front shirt-pocket, as if he only bought shirts that came with Lucky Strikes. When he held me against his chest, in his muscled roofer’s arms, I heard the crinkle of the plastic-coated package in his pocket. After he died of lung cancer when I was twenty-two, I bought one of the familiar white packs, with its bold red circle and black letters. I kept it close in my bedside table that summer. Some nights, I reached into the shallow drawer to crinkle the unopened cellophane package.
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Between 4’52” by Ashon Crawley
It’s all about agitational roughness. The roughness of sandpaper makes itself experienced, known, through difference. Those tiny grains of sand, each grain announcing itself as but so many irregularities across surface, giving miniscule – but no less felt – depth. Your hand touches it. Scratchy. You hear the sound it makes as agitational technology. Grating. You hear it because it makes dialogue with objects – of resistance, of refusal, of rejection. You feel it because its force resonates, because its vibration on and against other objects, is sent into the world.
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Ledge by Jill Talbot
We shouldn’t have been up there, up on that roof. Bud Lights guzzling the night. I remember the first students shuffling the sidewalks before the sun. Their heads down, their backpacks heavy as the dark folded its envelope. Only then did we think about pulling our legs up from the ledge.
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Bowerbirds By Jennifer Stock
When I was twelve, my parents took me to see an eccentric house in Wheeling, West Virginia. Plastic statues in clashing scales and jubilant disarray erupted from the house’s property lines: reindeer, jack-o-lanterns, Santas, teddy bears, flamingoes, nutcrackers, Jesus, Joseph, swans, Mary, and Magi, all interspersed with American flags. The owner had created a rickety grid-work of grotto-like displays extending around the home’s perimeter, a polyptych taken over by American holiday icons.
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Song about a Squid By Matthew Gavin Frank
So why the giant squid, after all? How did this particular beast become the basis for our Kraken? Why is it that when we think of the proverbial Sea Monster, the image most of us generate is one that most closely resembles the giant squid? Why is this animal the recipient of our need to mythologize? The giant squid is real, yet somehow remains, simultaneously, in the realm of myth. What combinatory cocktail does the giant squid embody that allows it, to the human world, to straddle both worlds: the actual and the legendary? Maybe it’s merely a fusion of its size and its rarity.
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The White Death By Justin Hocking
I contracted my own White Death back in graduate school, when I was first assigned Moby-Dick, and had to wake up at five or six a.m. to swim its immense dark waters.
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Hold Your Phone to this Essay and Select Tag Now by Joe Bonomo
I left the bar humming bare traces, the final moments of the song like excavated bones, already fading in the daylight, in the archeology of my head.
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"I have a feeling if I went online right now and looked at any news or commentary website, I could find something that would stir me to a Hulk-style rage." - William Bradley
Panel Discussions: Just Imagine by William Bradley
Just imagine—there I was, standing in line at the Shop-N-Go convenience store across from the country club where my parents played golf. My dad and I were running some errand that evening. Most likely, we were getting milk. We rarely bought groceries at the Shop-N-Go—they were cheaper at Kroger’s, but Kroger’s was farther away from our house. If I had to guess, I’d say my mother had discovered that we didn’t have enough milk for breakfast, and so my dad was sent on a quick trip to remedy this. I went with him because we had recently spent a long time apart—he had moved to West Virginia ahead of us, several months before the school year ended. I had missed him terribly and took any opportunity to be near him. This was the fall of 1987, and I was eleven years old.
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At a Loss by Jacqueline Lyons
Maybe I was always going to be divorced, turning away from marriage before marrying.
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