She calls herself Rat Girl, but she looks like a little Swiss doll. Now in the Chapel, she is singing round-eyed over our heads and serpentine-ing her head in the shape of infinity as she always does. Her arms are sinewy, pounding at her guitar; bracketing small...
The Marys—mothers, daughters, whores, saints, queens and killers—meet every Thursday afternoon in Riverside Park during the spring and summer months. In inclement weather they go to the New York Public Library on 67th Street, between the firehouse and Lincoln Center,...
The rookery is disguised as a shed. I keep a lawnmower and a pair of hedge trimmers for the sake of camouflage, stowed beneath nesting shelves. The nests are woven of straw, pet hair, and twigs pulled from local woodlands. Fifteen ravens, oil black. A single...
For breakfast, Zip and I will eat a rancid jar of olives, a brittle feather from the windowsill, and a single dehydrated fig. Good pickings, rich pickings, delicacies. We will start light, first the olives, then the feather, and finally the fig which has been confined...
The ghosts have come looking for my maid, but the maid is not here. The maid is out back in the alley with crusts of bread and apricot pits and chicken bones. The maid looked hard at me when I put her outside. Her eyes black and round as new moons. My whole body...
Blonde girls at school seek to become blonder. Blonde girls arrive with new highlights, preening at the way their faces are framed by golden honey. Blonde girls say, “I put sun in,” and blonde girls ooh and ahh. Blonde girls coo and comfort when the results are less...
You’re good at selling words. Every morning you go to the market with the other girls and offer up a word or two to the man on the stall. By the time you leave you have a pocket full of money, enough to buy food to last a week for you and momma. Momma doesn’t like you...
Endangered Species by Caroljean Gavin Things Never Stay Warm by María Alejandra Barrios A Too Small Room by Yume Kitasei Bit by Bit by Minyoung Lee Ornithology for Girls by Tara Stillions Whitehead
The actor has died thirty-four times. His first death, a grotesque slow-motion spearing in the midst of battle, was looped in a viral video and produced a glut of comments which were either laughing with or at him—he’d never conclusively determined, but he feared the...
When we heard that Mingming’s grandmother was coming to live with her, my sister and I asked our parents endless questions. Our Yeye and Nainai were faraway figures whom we saw once a year, after long flights. They held us in their insistent gazes and tested us on...
An old Bedford van passes you on the track to the *moussem. On top, penned but precarious, barely a bleat, goats. Good meat, you’re told. Behind you, the woman who shares your bed, the woman who wants to be your wife, she says. The woman who fucked your sister. Clawed...
She reached into the fridge for one of those individual tubs of yogurt designed to release the digestive tract. Her mother arrived and filled the house with reminders of her climbing age: thick orthopedic shoes by the door, prescription meds strewn across the bathroom...