Amitai Ben-Abba
I found the psychiatrist via my health insurance company. The clinic was underground. Dystopian, really. A white, fluorescent light made me feel even crazier than what I had hoped for. I think he was called Dr. Hofstatter.
By Zach Wyner
When I was a child in the 1980s, I vaguely understood some things and acutely understood others. I vaguely understood the big things that I was supposed to fear, like drugs, The Soviet Union, gang violence, and killer bees.
By Lily Hoang
When I was ten, I drowned in the ocean. Decades have changed the curvature of my trauma from fear to repulsion. Human sweat disgusts me.
By Dallas Woodburn
1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
2. Turn on a podcast to listen to while you’re cooking, perhaps This American Life or RadioLab. Something to distract you a little, cushion the silence.
Leanne Grabel
I ran into Lonni Britton in the Lucky’s parking lot a couple days after I got back to Stockton. Lonni was my best friend in seventh grade. She was also my idol.
Fabia Oliveira
The women around me were wailing and cheering, and I thought about how when I grew up I would learn to worship as they did and delight in the Lord.
Leah Mueller
If you deal with crazy people, you become crazy yourself. I should know. I have a degree in crazy, one of those life diplomas people talk about. I didn’t even know who my real father was until I was eighteen.
Jade Sharma
When white people ask me where I’m from and I respond I was born here, and they still wait for an additional answer, I know they’re thinking: “REALLY, WHERE ARE YOU FROM?”
Al Simmons
The last time I saw Howser was at Pauli Pratt’s new flat on Fat Street, just west of Broadway, a couple blocks inland from the lake on the far Northside of Chicago, in East Rogers Park.
Ieisha Banks
There was always a light in the dark. It dimly shined down from her room at the top of the stairs and no matter what I was always able to see it directly.
Philip Kobylarz
Flashback the circling ravens incite. Memory play, curtains open, in the darkness of the amphitheater: childhood times of around the age of ten.
Laurie Blauner
I Saw My Dead Cat Everywhere
I was chronicling perceived movements through sounds, a house creaking, something falling, and a rustling wind. All noises I credited to him. Cyrus was involuntarily lunar. After sixteen years I could predict his reactions.
By Jennifer Marcus
Julia Kristeva. Beautiful sounds. Not a sound in the name I don’t love. I remember falling in love with the long O sound. Falling in love with Gertrude Stein: “Milk. A cold nose makes an excuse.”
By Johnny Ray Huston
“Infinity room.” That’s what I texted to A the first time I saw his pic.
“Lol my bathroom,” he texted back.
In the photo, he was wearing a hat that said TROPHY BOY, and a tank top pulled up to show off his chest and nipples, the curve of his hips, and a trace of his ass. Behind him, a mirror reflection of cream walls and floor tunneled into blackness, frame within frame.
By Alicita Rodríguez
The dancing bears of Sancti Spíritus show up at inopportune times. During mass at Parroquial Mayor, for instance, where their kicks cause the thurible to swing wildly on its chain. Amid this pendulum of plumes, we suffer the clouds of frankincense.
By Alicita Rodríguez
Perhaps because of the French influence, Cienfuegos is a city dominated by outlandish color. It is called the Pearl of the South for its beauty. It should have been called the Mother of Pearl of the South, for its painted houses.
By Alicita Rodríguez
Havana is a city of doors and windows, an array of rectangles and rhombuses. Transom windows inside crumbling mansions let breezes blow from room to room.
By Rajpreet Heir
In the outskirts of Boystown, a neighborhood known as Chicago’s premier gay district, is a male dance lounge called the Lucky Horseshoe.
By Debby Bloch
Still on my back. Legs spread. Feet held in metal stirrups. I say to Dr. Dubrovnick, whose face peers at me from between my knees, “I can’t go through with this.”
“Debby,” he answers, “it’s against the law.”
By Diane Payne
For no obvious reason, I simply wake, then realize I haven’t a clue where I am. It’s so damn dark. I sit up and feel my heart pounding.
By Morgan Christie
You never met him; he died before you were born. Two bullets to the chest, one to the head, and one to the neck, it was a bloody mess. When your mother was called in to identify the body, she fainted. You were due in fifty-nine days, but she went into early labor.
By Wilfredo Pascual
1.
One night in 1979, my father saw a bat inside the bedroom. My young parents turned thirty that year and I was twelve, the oldest of three children.
By Louis E. Bourgeois
My uncle was a union foreman and got me a job as a fire watcher. I’d lost an arm a few months earlier, apparently I wasn’t good for much else but to watch for fires as the welders went about making sparks in the boilers of the ship.
By Caroline Sutton
In a museum to see four-year-olds touching da Vincis. Couples nearly making out. Black sneakers and rude bodies moving like slow fish between me and the art, distorting, altering the shot pheasant on a table with movement of bodies absorbing the pheasant, momentarily, unless they pause to take a picture of the picture to look at it in their kitchen or not at all, a dead image in a phone, testament to them.
By Chen Li
Translated by Ting Wang
On the wall of my study hung a copy of Pierre Bonnard’s lithograph painting The Little Laundry Girl. A teenage girl in dark green is walking aslant a wet, slippery street, supporting herself with an umbrella in her right hand and clutching a basket of dirty laundry in her left arm.
By Xu Xi 許素細
There should not be typhoons in November, but during this Chinese year — the snake one beginning mid-February 2013 that straddles early 2014 — everything is in turmoil. Typhoon season lingers too long into an Indian summer, that quaint romantic idée no longer fixe.
By Gregg Williard
In New York in the 1970’s-80’s my day job was as a “psychiatric aide.” On the unit we called straitjackets “camisoles.” Escaping was “eloping.” I wore all white. My night work was “aspiring painter.”
By Will Alexander
I am thinking of the ongoing condition of the human species, always signaling to itself what can be considered cellular malapropism. Which means history is a slippage into cul-de-sacs, and general behavioral dyslexia, carrying in itself burdensome seeds, existentially incapable of advancing itself beyond its continuing foment, incapable of extracting itself from the power of gross ruination.
By Will Alexander
The Greek summation grounded its motives in stricken insurrectional dice. Someone the stature of Sun Ra threw them, and could not be stricken or dissolved by such institutional lessening, by such case-by-case squaring.
By Josey Foo