Volume 19, Issue 2

Seasonal Fruit

Our first summer together: the avocado tree in my backyard bowed its head under the weight of fruit so plump it would burst under the delicate pressure of your painted fingernails. The whole neighborhood must have heard us laughing — those little green planets in our hands! — because soon enough, the local mayas were singing at our doorstep, little… Read more →

 Four Minutes

I scan a coworker’s bookshelves, my back to the revelry of guests I don’t know well, and never will. Ninety minutes is enough time spent steeped in the loneliness of this Mission District Christmas party. I drain my second margarita, bid the host goodbye and dash to Church and 16th to catch the last MUNI train of the night. I’m… Read more →

DELIGHTFUL

for Ross Gay Sitting at the stoplight, I watch the clouds move, wishing I was somewhere out in nature: the park, the woods, the childhood farm where I grew up, where I used to spread on my back on the grass with my sister and look up, naming clouds, in all their shapes and sizes. It’s a cold day, wet,… Read more →

Every Rabbit

every rabbit in a ten-mile radius has gone to flight. they’re late. they’re late. only some are lucky enough to have pocketwatches. most just run because time doesn’t exist only within constraints of humanity. so here the rabbits run because otherwise means death. what is seen as a cute & peaceful life is just another day of danger. the rabbits… Read more →

You’re Just Little

A woman holding a stack of dresses and jeans enters the fitting room and asks if I’m helping out my mom. It’s 1995 and I’m eighteen years old.  I’ve been a sales associate at this department store for over a year. I point to my blue name tag, say, “No, I work here.” She smiles and remains by the entrance. … Read more →

Avicide

The first fragment I recover, my father is bathing my brother & I. We are in our flat in Vernon Park. I am a child, six at most, submerged in a plastic bucket. No one speaks. No voices escape their open jaws. My father & brother in their boxers. The walls the colour of old blood. Someone asks me if… Read more →

For My Uncle

Naples was a heatstroke—everything humming: cicadas, burnt spoons, salt licking my earlobes. He handed me a bucket and told me to collect the broken ones. Shells split like lips. Jagged spirals. Rust-pink teeth. Veins that pulsed in the sun’s throat. The kind you’d never want in your pocket but couldn’t stop running your fingers over. He said the ocean spat… Read more →