The Japanese Girl

by Norman Sakai

Back in 1960 when this story takes place, I was Japanese. There’d been pressure since the war for us to say “Japanese-American” but that idea had never grown legs. For one thing, most of us lived in low-income, polyglot neighborhoods like East Los Angeles, where your race — I mean your real race, not some construct — was the most important thing about you. For another, we’d just spent the war in internment camps. The hyphenated term seemed a little pointless after that. Continue reading

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The Curse of the Dog, the Sunflower and the Young Mother

by Jill Michelle

after Alicia Ostriker

To be cursed
complained the dog
is to have your mom
home
all day
but not allowed
to move or play Continue reading

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Carrion’s Haunting

by Anne Champion

In East Texas, the vultures’ hunchback stare, starving
and relentless, pierces you like a beak to the gut,
as if they know something you don’t. They circle in flight,
stalk from telephone poles, glare in a way that accuses: Continue reading

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Beachcombing

by Sam Liming

Done floating, I come in on a wave
and skin my knee.

It’s South Carolina. All the beach
moms are wearing a red lip

and a flounce at the hip. I’m at that age
where I look at seventeen-year-olds Continue reading

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Verdigris

by Matt Prater

It’s July. You’re alone. Upstairs.
A storm is coming in: green-grey,
but yellow on the wallpaper’s
crest of checkered flowers. Continue reading

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