A man lives in an old house converted to apartments.
There is still a servants’ staircase, but now it
leads to a blank wall. And the walls are paper,
the ceilings must be crepe paper: every night
the man hears his upstairs neighbor getting it
from somebody, hears her gasping, even hears
her bed squeaking. Midnight, 2 a.m., he gapes
at the ceiling, he almost expects to see
their fluids come suffusing down through
the …
(In the previous installment of Born Into the Cycle, Lakesha Townsend described growing up with her mother, Gracie Marshel Wilson, known as “Michelle,” in the Imperial Courts project of Watts. …
One of my favorite places as a kid was the Alaska State Museum in Juneau, where I never got tired of ascending the vast spiral ramp at the entrance that …
The car was packed, the boxes taped and labeled,
and a babysitter played go fish on the porch
with the son and toddler daughter.
The windshield gleamed. A chip, thumbnail-wide,
Today is the 65th anniversary of what we Palestinians call the Nakba, when we were expelled from what is now Israel in 1948. My grandmother, Khadija, is one of those …
They have given you the name Obama
even though it isn’t yours.
The woman slicing cake behind
the counter her son wheeling through
the market loud when he sees …
beginning with a line by Fernando Pessoa
It is night. It’s very dark. In a house far away
a red sun has drained into the sea.
From the city I left, …
Paper people in a paper land,
a paper house, crazily slanted,
a house like a child would draw:
a square, a triangle, a circle
for the sun.
Stick people stand outside the house
by Patty Seyburn
Mark lived with a closet pornographer
and if we returned from Caramba’s too
soon, bottles of baby oil would be placed
strategically around the apartment
near gestures of …
Kneeling on a porch in Massachusetts, a woman
opens up a burlap bag of freshly spaded beets,
and opens too a fist of rain, musky earth, losses
never mourned—two husbands, …
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