I don’t know who will read this letter, or if this whole exercise is a trick. I don’t have any hope that it will reach the right people. I don’t even know if the guard will come back to collect it. But this is my story and the story of my country. Please save us if you can.
When asked by the Guardian to take a stance on feminism, Siri said, “I believe that all voices are created equal and worth equal respect.” That, with a thoughtlessness worthy of any robot, is a play on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous line. But it is probably an improvement over what Siri used to say...
Now, I don’t want to get carried away. Pay attention, kids. Some parental fears really are based in the empirical universe. You really shouldn’t run with scissors, or climb into unmarked vans driven by strangers, and acute appendicitis really is more likely to occur in children than adults, and that is exactly why whenever you had a pain in your side...
Perhaps you are like the rabbit
outside the fence, trembling in place,
having just escaped the hound’s
frustrated advances. You blend
We live on a graveyard arrowhead
where the Gullah battle haints and hags
and spirits of indigenous tribes
hover to claim what is theirs.
Theatrix is chock-full of trap doors, of trompe-l’oeils and mirrors. The ground is not solid; the air is not safe; the coast is not clear; the rug will be pulled out from under your feet. You feel it in your bones. Svoboda’s lines are elegant but she is equally eloquent in moving the “parts that can’t speak, or parts speaking inaudibly,” the innermost parts of our messy and...
The old comedienne moves her mouth, she does her stretches, her deadpan- without-so-much-as-a-twitch, and she times it. [It’s all about timing]. Old means she’s timed a lot [she may have timed out]. She always wakes early with perfectly useable patter that doesn’t have a story behind it. An existential joke, tailless they call it in the business.
I wake up at five in the morning /
because there is a rope moving up my neck /
an eel that swims up to my father and back again /
in the bathroom mirror my eyes are his /
They lived in a box by the side of a road, and within their box, they were gods whose thoughts came to life. With a sudden snap, they could collapse walls, raise ceilings, add stairs, re-do flooring, conjure statues, erect fountains, and more.
In all the months they had been living in...
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“I had three brothers,” she began, “but now—” Nella took a deep breath, held it in, let it out slow. “Now I am the last Vassallo. After me...
When I go to Erstagatan to be unfaithful it is spring, and I am 31 years old.
For four years I’ve been trapped inside a relationship, and this is me breaking out.
He’s just...
One of the aspects of the Rum community that Anastasiadou wants to highlight in the text is the community’s fear of and exclusion from mainstream Turkish society. This is rooted deep into Turkish history. Although at its founding the new Republic of Turkey was ostensibly a secular nation, it was explicitly built with a Turkish and Muslim identity at its core. This left non-Muslim minorities such...
Statement of Record