33.2 Winter/Spring 2021


Somewhere Michael Schumacher

Jensen Beach

There is a man in India who is every morning attacked by crows. I heard this on the radio not long ago. This man, he once rescued a crow that had become disoriented in his garden. And since then when the man emerges from his house, crows descend from the trees nearby to swoop at him and to peck. The birds have been attacking him for three years.


Poetry, Fiction, & Nonfiction

For the Love of Oranges

Leanne Ogasawara

Arriving back in Los Angeles when the orange trees were in flowery bloom, their fragrance nearly knocked me over, flooding me with childhood memories. The poet Mahmoud Darwish said that, “cities are smells.” Well, I can tell you, Los Angeles is the perfume of orange blossoms, jasmine, and the salty sea.

Second Best is Best

Isaac Yuen

Sometimes being best can be the worst. The prized antlers the wapiti so lovingly drapes with velvet and nourishes with aspen shoots can turn their caretakers into rumpus room decor, even though deerstalkers know perfectly well they could just wait for the elk to finish bugling its mates before picking up the discarded instruments for a song.

Southern Comfort

Quintan Ana Wikswo

When Toni and Lola have a good run with the oilmen, we all get to go up to Dallas for steaks and Neiman Marcus and drink thirty dollar cocktails made with real gold. Tina finished paying her forty-eight blowjobs for the red mustang convertible and it's hers now, fair and square, and Tina and Lola in front and Toni and me in back and there's no need for a hotel because we're not ever going to sleep again. Sleeping is for people who haven't been paid.

Beyond Belief

Annie Kantar

There’s one hundred and three year-old Mazal, known for the decades she gave to cleaning bodies before burial. Preparing the dead for death. Did they ever come to you, I ask. No, she guffaws, proof, as she sees it, of a job well done.

Kiddo

Nathan Spoon

What was it that slid through the field of my hand? / A mountain. I will say it was a mountain, although / it is no longer here for any other to see. It is elsewhere / and doubtless sitting like a toad whose voraciousness / desires to be appeased.

The All of It

Emily Strasser

Rachel felt small and held in the green bowl of the clearing beneath the boundless bright sky. She felt a tug in her middle, some big, sweet sadness, and knew she would always feel this way now, no going back, part wild thing, part person.

Bloodsuckers

Katy Mullins

Brigitte watches her mother swat at a mosquito sending ashes from her cigarette into her coarse gray hair. She’s smoked it past the filter, an orange nub in her fingers the size of a peanut. She’s always been this way, siphoning the last dab of nicotine out of every inch of a cigarette. Brigitte has never understood this.

Origin Story

Lyn Li Che

tell me again about the flood / the water stoppering the air & how our people / learnt to cross it by drowning / afterwards we rebuilt our cities underwater / lest we dared to escape ourselves

Somewhere Michael Schumacher

Jensen Beach

There is a man in India who is every morning attacked by crows. I heard this on the radio not long ago. This man, he once rescued a crow that had become disoriented in his garden. And since then when the man emerges from his house, crows descend from the trees nearby to swoop at him and to peck. The birds have been attacking him for three years.

Little Marilyns and Audreys

Laura Valenza

We’re filming on the verandah of the Golden Age Movie Ranch in Los Angeles County. 3 AM is my sister. She’s the third attempt in the Audrey-Marilyn series. They call me 7 MH, the seventh in the Monroe-Hepburn series. We’re different configurations of genetically modified and cloned fragments of DNA of the famed actresses. We don’t know what happened to our predecessors.

The Gallery

Brandon Shimoda

standing shoulder to shoulder / staring at a painting of a massacre / from which the sufferers [had] been replaced / to center the camouflage of negative space / that binds suffering to celestiality

The Movies

Naomi Kanakia

The man has a gun. He walks into a bank with the gun. He sees himself from the outside, enacting a scene from a movie. He shows the gun to the security guard, who sits down, and he shows the gun to the cashier, whose face congeals with fear, and it’s all happening too fast, too automatically.

Where She Was Forgotten

Karla Clark

before brunch bottomless hipsters march on / MLK would say these chicken tenders taste like / freedom rings

Return

Karla Clark

Back home is wider than my legs lost the beat when viper sting / hid your keys ‘tween his fingers and though he snorin’ I ain’t / lightfeet ‘nough to get ‘em you gon’ have to chain lang along

Lahore’s Morning New York’s Night

Ayesha Raees

My mother WhatsApps me and I am traumatized to ever answer anyone concretely. At 99 Favor Taste, over bubbling stock, over boiling shrimp, my friend says: This Is Not Even Your Country/ This Is Not Even Your Discovery/ Girl. I just like this planet. Girl.

Fried Chicken

Caroline Wray

She’s there on one of those red-herring March afternoons that make you think spring’s arrived, when everyone pours outdoors gasping, like they’re emerging from underwater. Her parents’ house is the worst on the block, squat and ranch-style, and she’s on a sunny ledge, a small plane on her roof that’s eye-level out your window, where you’re sitting in the stuffy green chair trying to read a Lincoln biography.

Demolition Order

Annie Kantar

a perhaps Hand (which comes // out of nowhere), arranging / her young face, // a window into which people look / (but don’t see— // arranging changing placing // a paper in her hand, / a strange / thing Can you (and a known thing) // read this here and / changing everything carefully // —she can’t believe.

Prelude

Brandon Shimoda

The repercussions of war the multiplying of god’s face / in a strobe-like assault of diffidence and death / is in the lower right-hand corner / of the primarily yellow painting // of war / In the cave

Hyrax Syntax

Shira Dentz

O aurora I see centers everywhere / & crescents too, multiplying bubbles / within which every sense / fractures concave & convex

Tree of Life

Brandon Shimoda

Someday I’ll stand speechless / on a grand, forgotten tree of life. // The ornate order of existence / will be my partner, and my partner / will be my shadow // My shadow will be preaching, will be endowed with / all I cannot carry / in this life, // overcome with questions, The tree of life is / not but // total / illumination.

Inimă / Heart

Romana Iorga

Eyes closed, / they sang mournful songs about sons / who forget to come home, while my / twelve-year-old heart worried that neither / the rain, nor my childhood would ever end.

Umbilical dot

Shira Dentz

take a page out of that / book, temporal without / a hitch of loathsomeness.


From the Archives

Ghost Dinner

Jon Hickey

As they headed back into town in Smiley’s pickup, she could only feel like they had all done something wrong, something to be ashamed of. Something they could never talk about again.

A Skilled Sport

Megin Jiménez

The logical conclusion of Despentes’ argument that femininity is equivalent to the art of servility is that a society of women made to worship femininity would have the most servile women. This may be why my American friends are horrified when I confirm the supreme reign of Miss Venezuela.

The Mongolian Goat

Leanne Ma

When someone asks me what I do for a living, I give a different answer every time.

Myth-making and Myth-breaking: An Interview with Jai Chakrabarti

Tayyba Maya Kanwal

Jai Chakrabarti’s fiction has a striking orality to it, a tone that emanates from his characters’ psyche and subtly permeates an entire story. On a 2022…