Ideas & Fiction
Government has always played an outsize role in creating jobs—and still can.
Many young children become obsessed with gender. How do we know which are trans?
On the cruelties the South doles out to animals, children, and black folks.
2016 Aura Estrada Short Story Contest Winner selected by Jennifer Egan.
body where none existed
God drew two bodies as one
went crooked . . .
Poetry is offering new candor about the ways men care for their children.
A stunning trove of letters from Elizabeth Bishop to her therapist sheds light on the personal secrets that shaped her poetry.
Tilda Swinton, icon of indy cinema, is masterful in Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash.
Poetry
Two people I love are parting.
I left
my shoes in the desert. Maybe
I’m like
a wedding, I have a formal
need to make
these two ideas meet . . .
This view of the cliffs.
A passing cloud.
A scattering of yellow paint.
A pink feather on the wire.
See how the firmament loosens
like a clod of earth how the horizon
crackles like two skulls wrapped in velvet
On you we barnacles
cling and scratch,
your rising fog
burning through . . .
Take this cup away from me
with its hints
of ammonia and dill,
oak or corrosion.
Who knows, really?
cyan sea.
Salt burns my nose when I
look down.
Nothing is near that belongs
to me . . .
The gods offer blank slates. The gods offer black marker smiles. They offer profit, excess, cardboard
box-headed children to the void so I don’t have to.
we did.
I used to be a slightly handsome
boy, then
this happened. . . .
wasn’t easy, or, apparently,
that
difficult. . . .
. . . Free is not a negro doused
in white, blanched,
bleached, and sent down
the path. Free
almost never means alive, so
please try—
I’m asking for help.
I want to get
to the managed care
evening,
where the future appears
to stream directly
into the past . . .
mourns. It’s the art we still dream once was.