Issue 162 News Today

The emergency goes on, but no one believes her about it anymore. Mary waits in the ER waiting room every Thursday from noon—the elementary school’s early release hour—until the end of her mom’s shift at the coffee cart, one floor up. Knowing no nurse will call her name, hoping to be surprised. Today, the room begins empty as her stomach but fills with anxious chatter in the

If you’re wearing a tee we would call vintage nowadaysperhaps with a pop star or soda brand brandishedacross the chest, waiting with your brother-in-lawfor your brother at a bench in the park in whichyou two will sleep, huddling together for warmth and to shoo away thoughts of permanent disappearance, you must be my father in Ciudad Acuña in 1991.When the police shake you two

Only way is to fucklike you’re stallingthe body’s departurefrom doingwhat bodies will do:end. Call it backfrom its routeto extinction.Tetherit to its ownunderbelly, the landof living. Speakits basement desire.If you can do that,well, thenyou’ve done a thing.Young sex misunderstands metaphor.To the young, the dying of the light, is mere abstraction. Light is not light.

Another name for nostalgia, some kind of traffic from yesterday, the way an argument finds a nerve you didn’t think could exist, the hymn for a religion of ash and cloud. I fell in love with a river that dried up at the foot of a tree. I didn’t know the ax I held was made from the wood of its offspring, didn’t know I could earn grief so easily without forgiveness. I always

I watered a wilting succulent.             The sun had begun to disappear behind             the apartments across the street. Afternoon turning             quickly into evening. Soon night. In the oven, sweet potatoes             roasted on one rack,brussels sprouts on the other.             By the windowpalo santo burned. Books

My grandmother had a list of things I couldn’t do. It was not a real list with faded ink on yellowed paper that she pulled out of an old, rusted briefcase, but a directory of interruptions, a bunch of dos and don’ts that, like speed bumps, stopped me from living freely.

The first dead body my son sees is a cat’s. It was in his favorite parking lot. Since the stay-at-home orders were put in place when the pandemic started, we no longer feel safe at Lindale Park, so we come here—the rough asphalt parking lot of St. Luke’s. Stanley enjoys riding his balance bike here, which he got for his third birthday a month ago in June. He’s slow and

You meet a boy that gives you reading assignments, leaf through Candide and Slaughterhouse Five and 1984, biographies of Morrison and Cobain and Clapton. When you scream at each other, it is erotic like climbing up into the rickety deer stand to sit in the torn office chair that rocks back too far. The stands all have names—The Hornet’s Nest, The Apartment, The Hole. You

She puts her eye to the window. It is bulletproof glass, papered over to block the harsh Angeleno sun and hide the iron bars that make the store look like a cage. A haphazard display of posters—frosty bottles of Budweiser, bikinied women, a rakish Joe Camel in sunglasses—but, in the center, a small square gap. Through this she focuses one eye on the man who moments earlier had

Translated out of the Old English, The Exeter Book, 10th c.