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no water tastes quite right since leaving home— too soft not the right kind of hard I tried ice cold bottled plastic and glass hot with tea leaves Learned ‘tap water’ in a dozen languages never finding what would quench a nostalgia at the tip of my tongue not yet remembered maybe once I think away it fades in each move I drink sparkling so the bubbles will burst the disappointment on my immigrant tongue that has forgotten where the water tasted right they say I say , sigh, before men came...

Main menu Published on July 16, 2026 I dig for medicine ink blind in the dirt, no news past the next elbow of night, scooped hands carving a husk for incomplete skin. I’ve bent there rooting under daylight’s million feet, breath rebounding from the mudpack in a second heat, every corridor a vein map drawn to build out the body, tap a witnessing pulse and beg this clay tell me my shape, let me know and be known by a lower mother that broods me into form and finish me that I may recognize my earth.

Main menu Published on July 2, 2026 During La Mercè I wander the Gothic Quarter, the heat of bodies and 100% cotton brushing against the back of my palm. I pause to take a video of graffiti my cousins say is ugly. One says: I don’t understand how someone could deface architecture like that. Some graffiti is beautiful, I say. Another asks: How could graffiti be pretty?

It was hot when they finally arrived in Jakarta. It was the furthest they’d been from home together since their honeymoon thirty years ago. This time, Ellen and Joe were here to stay. Retire in paradise on Java’s pristine shores! Ellen had the brochure tucked into her purse; she’d carried it for the past nine months like a talisman. Their few belongings had been shipped ahead of time. Their grown son, Rock, the only thing left behind.

Sibley notices immediately that Arianne Hebert’s life story is scattered across her palm like a handful of freshly tossed pick-up sticks, she’d be easily misled, easily convinced. There is very little space between her thumb and life line, and the shallow heart line with the circles across it – like someone had pressed two pennies into her palm – indicate this woman has suffered.

//Glue Part I – Glue One of the greatest fears of your young life was of running out of glue. You had full faith in the healing properties of the substance. You’d been assured. You’d been convinced, proselytized to by the zealots of adhesion. You were sure that losing a limb could be solved were there enough glue to connect the arm to its socket. When Paul Campanelli came back from hitting his head on the swing set that looked like a horse, he told you his mom said they’d glued it at the hospital.

I’m allergic to water. Not deathly, no anaphylaxis involved, just a skin-deep intolerance for that most life-giving of substances. Out loud, I address questions about my condition with the practiced factuality of WebMD, but in my head I’ve become a little more colorful. “How do you shower?” Like you, I want to say, naked.

Chirahora (ちらほら): here and there; now and then; from time to time; occasionally Everything one can ever feel about a person, she has felt about him. She is in the first grade, seated on the blue plush rug, her short, stubby legs folded in crisscross applesauce. In the corner is a stain from the time someone threw up, on account of the most recent outbreak of the stomach flu. She sits in the opposite corner, her back perfectly straight, as she awaits her final fate.

Hector watched April suck down a Marlboro under The Strand movie theater’s yellow marquee dotted in scorched-black bulbs. Her pale face shot smoke through a black hoodie. Hector snuck across salt-sick Superior Street. The filthy Michigan streets needed a blanket of snow. It would soon baptize everyone: his worn-thin teachers, snow plow drivers, hibernating farmers. He crept toward her, heard her snort.

An amateur might think of it as panic, but Estelle Marks didn’t. She knew better. She was seasoned. There would always be second guessing just before a show, but a successful competitor took it as an opportunity to remember the solid foundations of her thesis. Estelle washed her breakfast dishes, a plate, a bowl, her coffee mug, one spoon. She dried them and put them away, too, because on days she had go out, she preferred not to leave anything in the rack.