Dolores, nearing the end of her second ambulance shift of the week, sits in a plastic lawn chair outside the back of the fire station. Between calls she often hangs around there, away from the television in the common … Read More
the labor nurse said, He’s got hair! while Todd looked between his fingers from across the room and I wiped the fluid glistening off Nicholas’s pink forehead, touched his shock of dark hair, like Todd’s, but his face was … Read More
oil on canvas Mira que si te quise, fué por el pelo, Ahora que estás pelona, ya no te quiero. Look, if I loved you, it was for your hair, Now that you’re bald, I don’t love you … Read More
mixed media on canvas [i didn’t know he had a sister is the wrong thought. nonetheless it comes to me. so does the husband, ferried by the double name. a crossroads. pleasant to think there’s room for two … Read More
Lost Letters and Other Animals by Carrie Bennett (Black Lawrence Press, 2021); Besiege Me by Nicholas Wong (Noemi Press, 2021); Returning the Sword to the Stone by Mark Leidner (Fonograf Editions, 2021). You can tell a lot about … Read More
Muriel Leung, Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books, 2021). When bees swarm, it is as a function of reproduction. The hive has become too crowded, so the workers raise a new queen, and just before the usurper hatches, … Read More
The Dream Women Called by Lori Wilson (Autumn House Press, 2021). Lori Wilson’s second poetry collection, The Dream Women Called, focuses on a woman’s experience—girlhood expectations, love and sexuality, motherhood and daughterhood, and parental inadequacies, among other things. … Read More
Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge (Algonquin Books, 2021) The powerful bond between mother and daughter in Kaitlyn Greenidge’s novel Libertie is established in the book’s first line: “I saw my mother raise a man from the dead.” The year is … Read More
This is a work of fiction. Raymond and I walked through the prison yard—from the back classroom, along the chain-link fence bordering dirt sports fields, down the long gravel courtyard between dorm buildings stenciled with JFK’s and MLK’s … Read More