In the market near your flat, the fish are still partially alive when you buy them. The yellow-aproned woman calls you over, gesturing to the croaker, the red snapper—“so fresh! I’ll give it to you for 35 dollars!”—with blood on their gelatinous eyes, their snouts, leaking or twitching all over […]
I have always used art to express my personal struggles as a young, gay, neuro-atypical black artist, and to understand myself as an individual who is continuously being molded by my environment. Growing up as a black person in an environment with a high crime rate, being constantly reminded of […]
“There are a few starlings in there adding to the syncopation,” a woman said to me in the Trader Joe’s parking lot. Her safari hat slipped down the back of her head. Her white hair flashed a beat of purple. Her zinc sunscreen beamed in patches next to her nose […]
When I was twenty years old, I left a kitchen knife in the baby’s crib. It was a good knife, that meat cleaver. I miss it. Nice and sharp. It would cut right through flesh and fat or gristle and bone without a lot of sawing. Movie night with the […]
“Each painting is a crude diary of marking time, of hoping and losing hope, of standing still while the world carries on; punctuated by violence, bureaucratic indifference, and thwarted desire.”
Glenn Morazzini’s poems have won the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize, an Amy Clampitt Residency Fellowship, Maine Arts Commission Literary Fellowship and have been published in Poetry, Rattle, and other journals.
I first became familiar with Shaqayeq Ahmadian’s work after I found her page on Instagram one night in 2018. Since then, I have followed her development as an artist and we have become friends, bonding over the experience of being young women working in creative fields; however, because she lives […]
“to admit / the pink wind / is your finger / in my mouth / is not a display / of longing / it’s an exercise / in painting a pearl”
“in every in-between / I was born ready / yet I have still afforded
to lose / over not having / a house / a man / a body / a life”
When you place an order for Issue 35, 100% of reader donations will support Equality For Flatbush and The Okra Project. Help us amplify anti-racist efforts and change our institutions.
Growing up between Lake Forest, Illinois, and Long Island, New York, debut novelist Emily Neuberger dreamt of the Broadway stage. She began voice lessons early, at age twelve, and, throughout her adolescence, starred in numerous community and regional productions. She went on to study musical theater at NYU, along with […]
hi hello my name is sarah yes there are three other girls in my troupe named sarah yes I hate it yes I know hate is a very strong word would you like to buy troupe 98 candy from me so I can win the big blue excaliber mountain bike would you like to buy something?
Beginnings I came into this world in 1947, Austria. My upbringing was typical of the time and place, although perhaps my parents were stricter than others because my father was the local chief of police. Whenever I disobeyed my parents, the consequence was always the same. I was forced to […]
Patty Gone makes art about popular things. They have a strong curiosity for what makes people obsessed with Kim Kardashian or why people want to dress in all Gucci. Their work often focuses on different poles in culture and gender in the attempt to draw people toward some kind of […]
Award-winning Tibetan writer and filmmaker, Pema Tseden, makes a stop in NYC along his US tour to discuss his English-language debut, Enticement: Stories of Tibet.
SHE SPITS & TOUCHES HER TONGUE TO HER LUNGS I was outside myself, picking corn in a tall shadow,When I was ordained to be an Anglo-SaxonWarrior making my head from my own head, makingAn extraordinary instrument from which we shallAll suffer madly. And the mirror was always a jewel,And the […]
Dan Rosenberg is the author of cadabra (Carnegie Mellon University Press) and The Crushing Organ (Dream Horse Press), which won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize. He has also written two chapbooks, A Thread of Hands (Tilt Press) and Thigh’s Hollow (Omnidawn), which won the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest, and he co-translated Miklavž Komelj’s Hippodrome (Zephyr Press). Rosenberg’s poems have […]
Tokyo, JAPAN – 1989 Lizzie and her cousin, Kate, were giggling like schoolgirls inside their room at Sanjo boarding house. I knocked on the door, softly at first, then louder—three virile raps. Lizzie opened the door. She was wearing pink pajama pants and a lacy T-shirt. “It’s the American.” She […]
Onstage: Two porthole windows suspended in space.
Also, at least one wall (if not all of the walls) is completely covered by dark fabric that stretches from floor to ceiling.
The fabric flutters and ripples every now and again.
Karan Mahajan is the author of two novels, Family Planning and The Association of Small Bombs. His second novel drew me into his work through its unusual structure, in which the story radiated from the center and expanded outwards just like a bomb. When I read a novel and think […]
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