visual art
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Luggage Fee
Pre-Partition luggage tag for the ancestral round-trip Attendant sees my belly and lets me board early with the still-complete families Lahore traffic clouds my open eyes, the only part of me that can pass When storm-windowed shut, they only dream in American and only got here by exhausting the question: How much of Daughter’s climate…
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The Things You See
These are the things you see yet I remember: first, the animals in cages too small, littered with empty strawberry soda cans; then, the yellow cocoon of a puttering bus to Aden, …
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Skeletor
Skeletor had long wanted a body: to cover him, shield him, make him whole. He was only a skeleton. He was jealous of the other skeletons who had bodies. Sometimes, he would put clothes on and stuff them with pillows or crumpled up newspaper and stare in the mirror. He always put an extra pillow…
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Abdication
At first I think of postage stamps and the faces of queens, immortalized in their black-and-white moment. The shades of the past are monochrome, marred only by some accidental fold, some streak of pale lightning. Pink roses blooming on the wallpaper of my bedside dresser. When I take this photo between my thumb and forefinger,…
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Who Are These People and What are They Doing in My Living Room?
Your mother’s brother stands in the foyer, che this, che that accents of Argentina eja he says en vez de la ella de Mexicanos Tall and thinning, ruddy faced white beard groomed Su tía esta arreglando todo Couches, tables, chairs aligned in an oval lace covers crystal dusted and untouched The couple on the couch…
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Excerpt from The Storytaker
Scratch, scratch, scratch. Click, tap, tap, click. Pencils on paper. Fingers tapped table-tops with no particular rhythm. The days were too short and too valuable to make music while deep in thought. People scrunched up their faces, which were red and frustrated. Tongues bled under the pressure of teeth. No one spoke, no one looked…
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The Body of Stone
The island had been declared “surplus federal property” for five years, the legal way of saying it had been hollowed out and deserted of soul. The government had spent years trying to keep its “worst of the worst” inside. But when we returned as the island’s rightful owners, the same government wanted to keep us…
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Escape Artist
The moon was an escape and a trap. My life is this way; frying pans to fires to frying pans. I shook a frying pan full of eggs over the burner. Rick, who lit his cigarettes from the stove, pushed me aside, leaned down, blond hair hanging over the flame. He singed a few hairs…
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Unscheduled Stops
Click. Click. Gear shift. Gear shift. Entering Seattle City Limits. It was 2:59AM. Inside a 1995 Mitsubishi Eclipse, a passenger was staring out at the steel and asphalt of I-5 glimmering with the remainder of what had been torrential rain. Often, this section was snarled with traffic, but the streets were empty, and the…
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The Prophet
When I met him, I thought Larry was my dream guy. He was intense and intellectual, and he wasn’t very tall, but I could get past that. I could get past a lot of things about Larry, from his attitude toward wait staff—impatient—to his taste in clothes—lacking—and even to his penis size—underwhelming. What I liked…
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