Explore Diverse Voices

I remember being in a hallway, at the end of that hallway was a corridor, with the option to go left or right. If I went left down the corridor at the end of the hallway, at the end of that corridor, was an elevator. If I went right down the corridor at the end

Last summer I climbed an English hill my seven-year-old son said I shouldn’t. On a family road-trip across the United Kingdom, while walking around a sparkling, oval tarn in the verdant Lake District, we reached a fork. So far, we had strolled past giant oaks and leafy copses, quaint fences, and mellow glades—a pleasant enough

  on sundays      my mother would sigh sit me down between her firm brown legs unfurl my braids         a forest of jet black tangled roots and roses            her slight cool fingers pruning slick with grease         the mist of water like a bruise to an ache        hours later I’d rise graceless, still a child from her

It started innocently enough—letter here, a word there—and he reasoned that Mrs. Pookutty needed the help, her English-in-retirement simply having acquired some rust since her School-Principal heyday. She probably meant to use the right word all along, the one Prabhakar had just typed. “The unexploded ordnance just lay thier, partially buried in the sand –

Admit One: An American Scrapbook by Martha Collins, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016, 104 pp/, $15.95 Last spring’s release of Martha Collins’s Admit One: An American Scrapbook, is the third in a series that includes the volumes Blue Front and White Papers. The trilogy as a whole wrestles with race and racism in America from

For this journey, forget practical things.
Begin with touch and smell, silk and mohair
bird feathers, silver frog for joy, comb

Translated from the Spanish by Lynn Levin For Pablo Bacho What is the land, what is oblivion and what map bestows its gaze upon us: perhaps the stretch marks weep, ask us to what we might give birth without fire or stone. So many birds clutter the soul flighty and abandoned. Tell me, brother, which

(Summer) In June your mother asks for the ornaments. Your brother is at work and your fat sister is useless, so you bring the boxes down from the attic. There are more than a hundred of them. Colorful balls, Hallmark Snoopys, and gluey nursery school popsicle trees hang together with invisible threads. Sweating profusely, you

Whit was going back to the camp, retracing the accustomed path from years ago, straight north to recover the doll. Cleaning out the lost and found where it had fallen behind a cabinet, someone had seen it tagged with the old reservation, called to tell him the mermaid was still there. Hanging up, he’d become

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

     1. Gdansk. My father in a pram. That’s his older brother Moshe standing like a soldier, his cap pushing out his ears. Grandmother and grandfather on the settee wear borrowed clothing from the photographer: grandfather a black frock coat over a high-collared shirt, grandmother some dusty, Edwardian straight jacket. They’re not smiling.  The occasion is

Our train moved faster until our country was a blue fold in the horizon. Passengers remained still as our carriage fell off the dining table. You smiled with lips that had dried as you queued in the snow for monthly rations. That day, you brought back the carcass of a bird, laid it on the

Today, two teams tried to tackle taboo topics too turbulent to transcribe. The titillating, transcendental triceratops, tirelessly tries to triumph, teeth taken task to task tail to tail. Together they tried to tie the two toucans to the timber to tell them two tall tales, till treelike tutors touched the tender tension to take the

Walk until the day becomes interesting. That’s the approach to slow travel that Rolf Potts suggests in his book called Vagabonding. It’s also my preferred approach—although I didn’t dare use it my first day in Fes.

America’s current obsession with veterans and supporting them has seeped into our daily routines since the initial invasion of Afghanistan almost twenty years ago. Eateries and oil change shops offer discounts; furniture stores back their commercials with rippling red, white, and blue graphics; and there is always a pro-military bumper sticker in the afternoon rush

Click thumbnails to enlarge Artist’s Statement The twenty-seven inmates I photographed act as a metaphor for our criminal justice system. The Final Exposure project actually started for me at about age 15 when I argued the issues of the death penalty with my father. Six years of my life have been devoted to documenting the

I I want to tell you a story about innocence, skin color, privilege and invisible walls. It was a cold, rainy evening in England. My husband and I had flown in to spend the holidays with his adult children and two granddaughters, aged three and one. Vivian, the older of the two, a gorgeous redhead

When I hear the word costume, I think of a pink dress I bought the summer of 1993, when I was eleven, going on twelve.

My mother is dressed and ready to leave the house, but five minutes before we’re supposed to walk out the door

She comes bearing fruit, ancient by way of Asia, Africa, Alabama, digging for time, six thousand years to the other side of the world. She comes bearing fruit, rock- serious ovaries birthed without, breaking, blooming white as winter leaving overnight. She comes bearing fruit, ripe, finger-circled gifts boxed, settled into levels, for reduced swelling, burning

Bad habits persist:
The nail biting, the bickering.

Beside the sand trap
like a bull fighter’s cape . . .

We sit in a line on a bench in Washington Square Park, my first son, me, my second son. Suitcases flank us—two of us are headed to the train station and on back home. One of us will stay here in the city of his birth. I can’t hear their voices because what I’m thinking

One sees all manner of life rock up in the waiting room of a doctor’s surgery. You have the red-faced teens with their embarrassing infections sat next to the bleary-eyed mammies comforting scabby-arsed babies.

When the waters have finally receded, night falls. None of them are used to such darkness (……………Obsidian……………) so black they cannot see their hands before their tear-stained faces. None of them have ever been without human light, without electrons, miraculously harnessed, without the power of the universe to obliterate ancient shadows. (……………The extraordinary dedication of

We peeled off our rain gear at the back door of the Grant’s Pass Hotel, wrung the water out of our gloves, and traded our muddy boots for sneakers and moccasins. It wasn’t dark, but it might as well have been.

When one great love was done, finished, I wanted to know the bees. So I painted beehives the color of blushing dahlias and worked the secret earth room of my body down into them,  each tired muscle, each sad hip—a bottomless longing pulse from my limbs. In my ears a song loop—not a mother, not

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

We are all contemporary writers in the sense of being alive, here, now, productive, and  unframed by criticism; and most of us are struggling for recognition by editors and agents, who stand as gatekeepers to publishers and living readers. We are not all contemporary, however, in the sense of taking this shared present as our

Trinity Test Site, July 16, 1945   Great poets dream of clarity and beauty. Even hell has its finer points. But when the announcer shouts out, “Now!” and from the ethereal sky comes hideous ruin down hurled headlong flaming, winged with red lightning and livid flames’ fueled entrails rolling in black billows, words are beggared

   – circa 1950s, circa 2020s   THE PAUSE “Women. You can’t live with ’em … ” and pause, wait, hold it, little bit longer … aaaaand … that’s it. End of joke. Buddy Sego was big. Bigger than his namesake, Buddy Hackett. Bigger than Jackie Mason (and less Jewy, people would say, just not

There are times when I miss it, throwing back shots with friends, bumpin’ that bumpin’ as Charli might say Feeling oceanic low, getting seraphic high, just to feel infinitely lower on those blurry nights, lighting the butt-end of cigarettes, crying in the passenger seat of Leo’s beater, remembering that thing I did when I was

There is a hand at the end of the knife, a small hand. It is my hand.

For decades, I hid the fact that my family operated a Thai restaurant. Whenever someone asked what my parents did for a living, I’d respond with a vague non-answer: “Um, I just have my mom and grandmom, and they work in the food industry.” Over time, I developed a knack for stalling and redirecting, posing

I wish I was an anti-type, but, I’m dull, I’m over

hyped. Today,

This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.

Translated from the German by Stuart Friebert She climbed into her red canoe without a paddle on a road heavy as lead, without water apples in her pack, absent a future, postcards in gaping shoes, dead holiday greetings yesterday, superseded, freezes, in the faces behind the blinds, the dark’s falling guillotines in the last crack,

The first time I saw Tabloid Mary, I mean the first time I really recognized her enormous potential For iconic bronze statuary, an archetypal model Of rural American poverty, one afternoon in 1962 As I sat on the couch watching television in a trance And nibbling toward the center of a peanut butter sandwich After

Who would miss it if it wasn’t gone?

(i) Wavers, hesitates in its urge to thicken as the watertable drops and we walk toward crisis in to the everything that is not me, in to the everything that is not you. What beautiful lies fuse the months together as we try and slip quietly past creation. Sorting pebble from pebble, we pick out

The best thing that could ever possibly happen happened that summer. He was forced to go live with people he didn’t know, people with reasons to try and undo him.  Also, these people scared him because they lived in utter squalor.  At first, he had no earthly idea why it happened. Though maybe that isn’t

The year many found the needle but lost the thread.

When was lost, stayed lost. AIDS. Rhodesia.

Translated from the French by Eliot Cardinaux THE PRODIGAL’S TORCH The quarantined enclosure burned You cloud move ahead Cloud of resistance Cloud of caverns Towing hypnosis. ONGOING TRUTH The crevice’s inventor Tugs tumult’s rope We gauge the depth Along the riled contours of the thigh The quiet blood that releases Confuses the needles Raises love

The origin of sound was my bare feet curling around blades of grass as I circled, ditch to ditch, waiting for the perfect, pious set of headlights to beam me into the beak of something that wouldn’t spit me out. The origin of heat is that night I spent in the cornfield. Shards of stalk,

“Let’s see how fast she’ll go.”
No pudó creerlo . Eddie managed to fix up his old man’s Chevy, and now the wind was blowing through the open windows on him…

The fog hasn’t rolled in this summer evening and Charu rather enjoys the warm weather during her half-hour walk from the Berkeley Downtown BART station to the Krishna temple.

Everyone calls him Manteca, which means lard in Spanish. The moniker implies fat and he may be slightly overweight, even a little thick around the waist, but it’s the slippery quality of lard that earns him the nickname.  It doesn’t help that his lips retract when he smiles, with the top lip often disappearing behind

On the Plaza de la Independencia – Bronwyn
warm air has filled our lungs

As flowers in the bathtub
Trees on the subway
A garden in a closet

bones. Visible under bits of meat and dark skin—strewn, wanting    y’all-better-finish eating-‘fore-y’all-go-outside-bones left with animal still clinging by a child, too secure; whittled back-in-MY-day-bones used to pick teeth (also bones) with plaque; dried out bones of apples ex-red. The fibula of a last meal: two pizza rolls. Did-you-know-there-was-pork-in-this??-bones—of a pork chop; orange bones, pumpkin skull

As the choir brings the psalm to life, Fr. Daniel taps one finger on the armrest, in time to the beat of his own impatience. Seeing Samuel squirm in Stacy’s arms, and seeing Stacy rock him, ever so slightly, and seeing Joseph tap his fingers and shift his feet and adjust his tie and look

                     –after the 1967 Arthur Penn film  Their penance—not yet exacted— Warm wind, from the open windows of the pulled-over canary-yellow Model A Ford. Clyde flipping the radio dial. Static. Insects. Chirping. His shit-eating smile. Silence sparking through sunlight— but for a rush of starlings entrained with the dapple-lit couple as if—like the fiddlers and

I want the dark back, the bloody well of it, my face before the fire or lie alone on the cold stone and find a way to sleep awhile, wake clear and wander. Deborah Digges, “Write a Book a Year” The wrens have returned, a male making his rounds of possible nests. I moved the

Following the Day of Liberty, March 3, in Sofia, with a few impressive explosions right outside my window, on Tsar Osvoboditel — a kind of imitation of St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt complete with a huge Cathedral, Alexander Nevsky, at the end of the street — on March 4, I heard explosions again, and looked out the window to see a huge parade of people in red.

Alacrity—not my middle name— boldly lays siege, item by item, to a miasmic to-do catalog approaching zeal. That’s someone else’s doppelgänger, not mine. I’m more easy-going (except when I’m not), a laissez- faire drop-by-whenever, give-what-you-can kind of gal, list-less. However you slice it, whatever its name, I gave up on musts and have-to’s just after

On days that suffer,
my true stature is about two and a half feet tall,

I love being someone who charges the net for a midcourt slam and surprises with an ace now and then. Which is why a fact that I never mentioned at twenty, forty, or even sixty, is now my shibboleth: “I’m a tennis player!” People look me over and say, “Wow! You still play!” and I feel powerful in the world.

This morning you’re thinking about shoes, of a painting your sister is trying to complete, socked feet of all those young men, her son’s friends come to make a shiva call, to visit a mother in shock, grieving, boys removing sneakers so as to not soil her carpet. Fifteen years later, she paints what she

A wheelbarrow rotted through Winter,

now filled with soil and sun,

will soon be bearing blossoms—

daisies, blue bonnets and snapdragons—

Down through a forested gouge in the earth, we took the trail under tall firs and cedars toward our secret lookout. We wanted to take in the distances over our inland sea. Off that water an icy wind infiltrated our slice of woods—old conifers shifted, moaned like live sirens. Ferns thrived on those moss-curtained towers—countless

This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.

My husband Ireland wanted me to quit as a physician and join him on a trip to Italy. I wasn’t thrilled.

All men want you.

Your hand on my thigh.

The candle flickering.

When he got back from the movies, my father’s face was uncharacteristically bright. Shaped by the sensibilities of his generation—Korea, John Wayne—he had always maintained a careful, emotional blankness, the impassivity taken, at the time, to signify masculine strength. Every morning in the fall he would drive us to grade school without speaking, thirty minutes

It’s always winter when I think of him,

gray skies, fog seeping up from the harbor . . .

I was teaching seventh-grade Humanities in New York City when the first plane hit. 

When I pick up my 9-year-old daughter from school, the first thing she does, as soon as she clambers up onto the backseat and dumps her heavy backpack aside, is to squeeze her petit torso between the two front seats and, like a trained parakeet, bend her head to offer me my bribe, a kiss

This is how we sleep: three in a bed, in a dust-grey room with a single window, fused shut, where cracks as stark as lightning forks run amok along the walls.

Count Giulio Vincenzo Zannini was conspicuously beautiful – when he entered a room, you could feel the air skip a beat.  Almond-brown skin and features so fine they could have been carved by Michelangelo.  He was born in Rome on July 13, 1900, but Mom always said he was better suited to the Renaissance. I

This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.

She enters softly today, her firm step
and swaying hips gone as she slips in,
whispering to God for forgiveness …

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

Shook foil—that’s what a river is. Catfish hauled like bars
of iron

from a mid-town bridge,
the wire that holds them

the year is nineteen ninety-nine
judge judy is playing
with my pre-rolls some group sings happy

Flooded with off-key carousel music days careen by, dizzying thoughts, meaning more blown out than a famous self-taught trumpeter’s cheeks. Patted down & packed into shrinking seats, I feel myself ballooning into less. Flew away yet took it all with me, on fire doused in northwest tranquility. Obscured by clouds in the brain, I knew

Part 1 Joyce Johnson and Roger Pratt were both raised in the same neighborhood on Chicago’s far South Side; however, he was five years her senior and they did not run in the same circles of classmates and friends. They did not actually meet until the first year of Bush 43’s second term, when they

morning wash went gray come afternoon

sun went pale and sort of sick.

here they lie and lying exaggerate the catch

though they’ve caught nothing

If the air
entering us,
doing the work,
that we call ‘breath’

He hid the fire in a tall hollow stalk of fennel, out of the sight of the great one who delights in thunder. —Hesiod, Works and Days   In those mountains he met others walking in the same direction. Backpacks, black plastic garbage bags, food sacks, a girl with two hard-boiled eggs, the shells flaking