Family and personal pictures are soul things. Sharing them is a kind of double exposure; history and soul = memory . . . Your mom praying to Buddha and there you are, free. Like my mom praying to Buddha in …
Read More
Features
INTRODUCTION
Yet somehow they felt—how could one put it—a little not quite here or there. As if the play had jerked the ball out of the cup; as if what I call myself was still floating unattached, and didn’t …
Read More
It was the beginning of fall, and the whole town was abuzz with talk of the baiga planned for Independence Day. The country was up to its ears in crisis, and new words like “inflation,” “hyperinflation,” and “liberalization” had made …
Read More
6.
Imagine an octagonal structure. Each of the eight sides, named alphabetically from A to H, is in fact a long building, filled with cells. The inside wall of each lettered side is open—sealed with iron bars but otherwise transparent …
Read More
In December 1950, Flannery O’Connor boarded a train in Connecticut to visit her mother, Regina O’Connor, in Georgia for Christmas. She was twenty-five years old, had left Georgia at age twenty, and was riding a string of successes. A graduate …
Read MoreThere was something about the catchers. The way they crashed around in their armor, throwing their bodies against the world like they were unbreakable, flashing a secret code between their thighs. You looked at them and understood what they were …
Read More
It was almost twenty years ago now that a stranger took my photograph. This had never happened before, not that I knew, and it has not happened again since that night. The photograph was taken in Manhattan, in the upper …
Read More
Before the Onslaught
What is an ear, but a snail shrinking inside the head?
The city crawls with men in safety vests
& hard hats. They swing from ropes,
climbing long ladders of dust. What’s sadder
than being
Poetry
Fog; Voices in the Night Forest; & Date Palms Upriver, translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa
Fog
No boats hovering on the river
and the scattered trees hide behind
a sky-wide sheet of cotton.
Only the fence rises black in the whiteness.
The birds that chirped in the early morning fall silent
and the light