for Lauren B. /Lawrin B. At dusk, when regal moths kill themselves ignoblyon the bare yellow bulb of your porchlight, I name futures like racehorses. Alphabet Soupis the future in...
One of my favorite parts of an MFA program is getting to know other writers on a more nuanced level--beyond interpersonal interactions or their work alone. I get to know...
Donya Zaragoza, née Castillo, allowed herself to be whisked away from her beloved Batangas family home to the southern province of Bicol because she knew that marrying a Zaragoza meant...
We worked until dawn back then—Afros and longhairs on the loading dock,mocking the small paychecks that cameeach Friday at shift’s end, the last truck now hollowed out, the bass metal...
I grew up in a laughing house. Granted, it was sometimes a yelling house, or a screaming house, or a crying house – but the important thing was, my family...
We are having a wedding in our restaurant. All morning, my younger brother, Hamid, has been scampering like a skinny, tail-less monkey, hanging lights in our cypress trees. We have...
What did I think, then, in those years biding my time, waiting? Waiting: for life to get serious, whatever that might mean; for maturity, whatever that would feel like. But...
The boy sits in a field.He is four or maybe three.Red-shirted, blue-shorted, he arranges his gathered trifles, loose sticks, wasp’s wing, snail’s shell,sifts fragments too minor to signify.The weedy grass around...
I’m not sure what I was expecting—maybe with more (read: all) time at home, I would be nothing short of prolific, à la “Room of One’s Own” at last. I...
in early July, just before harvest, mud on the frilly white hemof my sundress. Barefoot. We squeeze the last drops of beer from the keg — my little brother barely...
Another August morning the sky opensits smoke-heavy wings, and after so many years of silence, we hello each other in the cafe,as if not knowing the wooded placewhere we parked...