Inherited but Never Inhabited
By Essay Issue 68
Inherited but Never Inhabited Story and the Garden MY GRANDMOTHER MARY ALICE kept her big, tissue-paged Bible beside her party-line telephone and flipped through it, reading here and there, as she listened in on the stories being told along the Edmond Road. Even now, many of my kin keep Bibles by them the way…
Read MoreRecognizing the Stranger: The Art of Emmanuel Garibay
By Essay Issue 68
ART MAY BE CONCERNED with the creative manipulation of images, but words are always part of the picture. When we encounter a work of art, a load of labels and captions, categories and explanations always works to help or hinder our better understanding. Some are printed on the wall beside the work; others we carry inside…
Read MoreYou Who Seek Grace from a Distracted God
By Poetry Issue 82
You, who seek grace from a distracted God, you, who parse the rhetoric of empire, who know in your guts what it is but don’t know what to call it, you, good son of a race of shadows— your great fortune is to have a job, never ate government cheese, federal peanut butter— you, jerked…
Read MoreOur Royalty
By Poetry Issue 82
The greatest evil is when you forget that you are the son of a king. —Martin Buber, Tales of Hasidism Yet, aren’t I the son of Joe Terman, used car salesman? And wasn’t he the son of Abraham Terman, carpenter, until injured by a salami truck, or was it a cable car, on Cedar…
Read MorePlates from a Forgotten Book: The Paintings of Kim Alexander
By Essay Issue 81
IT IS A RARE mild September afternoon in Dallas when Kim Alexander sits me down. We are at her kitchen table, mere yards from her studio, which has spilled out of one spare bedroom into that familiar mid-mod home space, the den. In the regional vernacular for which we Texans are known but which we…
Read MoreA Map of the Watershed
By Short Story Issue 81
THE SPELLS CAME late that summer and left him bewildered, muttering. He had known this was coming, had felt the tremors in his mind and seen familiar objects—his can of shoe polish and his TV remote—transformed in his hand into strange artifacts. The TV remote he found in his desk, facedown beside the calculator. The…
Read MoreIn the Clear
By Short Story Issue 84
THEY STOPPED BINDING YOU a while ago, probably because they think you won’t try anything, that you’re too far gone now. You think they’re right. The only time they still use the blindfold is when they do their thing, when they make shallow cuts in your chest and upper arms and thighs, their laughter razor…
Read MoreThe Spif
By Short Story Issue 84
SINCE ACCIDENTALLY BEING LOCKED inside Carmody’s Used Books, I’ve slept badly. In the mornings I manage a bright if groggy farewell as my husband gives his suit pockets a preflight pat and the kids shrug into school backpacks. Alone, I pour myself more coffee and read—the newspaper, catalogues, reviews in the alternative weekly, passages of…
Read MoreTransfers
By Essay Issue 83
DON’T FORGET YOUR TRANSFER,” my grandmother said. From 1989, she said this to me for ten years. It took two buses to get from the West Side, where I studied and lived, to the East Side, where she had lived her entire life, first on its lower end and now, in her eighties, its upper…
Read MoreThe Open Window
By Poetry Issue 83
In Pierre Bonnard’s The Open Window the artist looks outward from his modest living room. It is summer, the heat baking the orange on the grill-like wall. To the right, a woman is resting in a chair, escaping as she can the sizzling midday air in which even her quizzical black cat blurs in the…
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