Columns
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Casino
You hit the jackpot and I was angry at you. Lucky, lucky you. I forgot about your mother’s tumor, the fingertip edging the light switch of her pituitary gland.
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Neighborly
I met Leeanner and Ed six years prior when I bought my house in east Austin. I had saved up the down payment working tech jobs I hated, and I was excited to nest. I told myself it was a…
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We Never Needed Each Other
“I have wondered if my mother’s unhappiness is rooted in having three daughters, which in a traditional Chinese family meant my parents tried unsuccessfully three times for a son. I have also wondered if my mother’s unhappiness, evidenced by her…
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Desire is the engine of magic: An Interview with Silvia Moreno-Garcia
I wanted to write something inspired by the witchcraft folklore I learned about from my family growing up back in Mexico. But I also lived in Massachusetts for a little while and wanted something related to that locale, which is…
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Two Poems
Forgive yourself. If it’s hard, start small: throwaway thing you said in passing that’s kept you sheet-thrashing all night. Stack of coupons you let expire; waves uncaught when you came in early despite offshore wind.
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“Full Throttle from the First Sentence:” A Conversation with Ivonne Lamazares
“Many of us go through similar experiences, where the foundations of our lives and family dynamics collapse. These situations force us to come face to face with the instability of self-narratives, family structures, and personal identities. I’m enormously curious about…
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Grief Makes Nothing Happen
We all recognize certain types of loss. If we’re fortunate, we take bereavement leave from our jobs, perform the pre-made grieving rituals. But we also know these aren’t the only losses, nor are they always the worst ones. Surely you…
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Clutching to Community Over Contemporary Culture
The ways in which the group will support one another …defines how friendship can stand in direct rebellion to societal status quo
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Four Poems
Once I read the best poem ever and dropped the book in the tub. Don’t say I’m not willing to risk it all for love. I pulled the book out sopping wet and read it anyway the pages translucent as…
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In the Land of Beauty and Illness: A Conversation with Eshani Surya
“One of the reasons that I’ve allowed my book to exist in so many genre containers is because I’ve often felt like my own life is simultaneously a coming-of-age story, along with a surreal fabulist story, along with a medical…
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Poems Are Really for People Who Don’t Read Them: on Patricia Smith’s “The Intentions of Thunder”
Ten chapters, if you will, demarcate a full life of writing, storytelling, and keeping history. Each section opens with a prelude—an interface with the interior of a poet reviewing the lens through which the work was made then and how…
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Garth Drunk
Because we had, during previous hang-outs in bars, gotten thoroughly obliterated drinking beer after beer, and because we had drunkenly parsed the emo-pop/punk divide and the boys had gotten into a good natured emo-pop/punk fight that soured, and because they’d…