She says go like this and bares her teeth at me, lips pulled back. All the other girls lean in to see inside my mouth, too close. I smell the leather of their shoes, but I don’t flinch. Jagged, asymmetrical, the bottom row marred by a large yellow-brown stain, thick as bone and nearly the size of the tooth itself. My teeth, fighting to be in the front of my mouth, ending up in a gnarled traffic jam behind my lips, are not the only shame I carry: my legs are pockmarked with tiny scabs, places chewed and scratched. My stepfather believes in dogs: in owning them, training them, punishing t ..read more

  I began reading Clare Beams’s extraordinary work with her first novel The Illness Lesson, which follows young women at a newly founded school in nineteenth-century New England where the students begin to mysteriously fall ill. That novel brought to life the real through the surreal, and because of that experience, I then turned to Beams’s short stories, which are equally startling, yet eerily familiar. Many tell of women’s experiences in a past that reflect our own present, including her memorable story “Lidded” about a working-class woman who serves as a labeler at a pickle-jar factory ..read more

  Trula be gone, selfish-flown some say or eyeing a new man. I say, Tru chugged by her own factory steam—didn’t one of us help or remind her of the mold blooming up the sides of her curtainless house—that Judson was like his daddy again; like the same rat-run box, his anger at the world shocking us shushed beyond Tru’s plight to a comfortable hedge. He never did stop perplexing her head—Judson, and now home yet Tru wasn’t; she broke-armed once for shunning Jud’s gift of a stolen stove, so maybe now at a run by Chicago (or the likes) and all I want to beg her is: let’s beat your rugs—come ..read more

  The first thing they had to do was name us, as if we were rescues or strays. As if they would need a way to gossip about us, to get our attention. We mostly did not like our new names. Most of us were undeniably old, now, and were given old-fashioned names. Our hair had been shaved off, and we were naked, so some of us were given convict or sex worker names. Bruno. Frank. Gladys. Angel. Some of us liked our names. Two of us were named the same thing: Denver. One after the singer, the other after the mile-high city. We all liked that singer. We thought of him when we drove on country roa ..read more

  /fjuːɡ/ noun A piece of music popularized during the Baroque period in which a primary melody, or subject, is introduced by one voice, then systematically passed to and developed between others in a polyphonic, intertwined texture.   1. Subject The subject is the principal melody. It begins the fugue, entering bold, alone, turning over the silence. In the kitchen, there is a photo of me in a diaper and a pink shirt, squatted behind a xylophone. In it, I’m smiling toothless, fists frozen, flapping against the rainbow keys. Waipo always loved that photo. The story was that she’d t ..read more

  “I like your look,” you say, cradling your laptop, maneuvering past the jutting armrests to sit next to me. “Thanks.” I put a limp bundle of shoestring fries into my mouth. The armrests, you explain, are to keep people from sleeping. “I like to imagine they are real arms,” you say, showing me how to crawl under them. Your OD green sliding underneath them makes me imagine all the worse places you’ve slept. I know you would tell me if I asked, but I don’t. “One arm at the chest, at the hips, over the ankles,” you say, slapping the leather on top. “Locked and loaded!” I nod and say somethi ..read more

  Sometimes Mrs. Bowman rode the school bus to her jobs. She’d be waiting on the road with her children—her daughter, Suzette, and son, Buddy—both of whom I knew to be in High Levels of reading and math, as were my sisters. We all lived far out. Our bus driver’s name was Hans. His impartial smile, if you noticed it getting on the bus, stuck with you. Hans owned his own school bus and kept it well-cleaned. Even the rounded roof he hosed off by his milk house after the chickens had roosted on it a couple of nights. Mrs. Bowman wore the zippered jumpsuit everywhere you saw her. Her knuckles ..read more

  My first time in Miami is tiny cups of sweet Cuban cortadito; and going to the Miami Open with my husband to join the crowds cheering for Carlos “Carlitos” Alcaraz, the Spanish teenage sensation and World #1; and rainy rainy rainy, but never gloomy days; and dense humidity; and flirtatious palm trees; and lechon asado at Versailles; and inhaling the smell of musky vanilla perfume on a girl walking by too fast for me to ask what scent she’s wearing; and then stopping to ask an Israeli couple and their teenage daughter to take our photo at the touristy Miami Beach sign; and staying to tal ..read more

  Essay by Rachel León • I met Nora Decter over Zoom when we were tasked to outline her forthcoming novel, What’s Not Mine. We were both fellows in Stony Brook University’s BookEnds program, paired to work together on our novels dealing with addiction. I’d recently read her current draft, as well as her 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in Literary Fiction winning debut, How Far We Go and How Fast, and without much preamble, we began dissecting the novel in progress. We graphed out characters, themes, and plot points in a colorful digital diagram in order to examine what was on the page. We ..read more

  In The Hunger Book: A Memoir from Communist Poland, Agata Izabela Brewer probes potent memories and delicacies from her Polish childhood in a home of maternal neglect and alcohol abuse. Expertly written and researched, with historical threads of Communism and the Chernobyl disaster, Brewer includes ten chapters themed around food and hunger (among them: “Mushrooms,” “Lard,” “Bread,” “Blood,” “Carp,” “Vodka”) to tell the story of her youth, which was “dust on empty shelves in grocery shops, queues for butter and meat in frost-sprinkled mornings, drunks sleeping in staircases of [her ..read more