And All of Us Go Drowning in the Loam

Our Goodly Sun Standing at the foot of the aisle, Sheriff Black Bear waited for her cue. Soon, she would walk Pastor Chickadee up to the little stage in front of the church, where the mayor was giving a speech beneath a banner that said Happy Bicentennial. In the meantime, she blinked a couple times…

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Three Poems

It’s okay, you’ll be wound sometimes.
be gaping, be cry,
be rock, be shiver, be rumble,
be ramshackle,
be shaking ancestors in your sleep.

To be part dead.
to razor, to lash, to hang, to be
thing that flails, to be cathedral,
to be gravestone. to speak cobweb.

Let me tell you:
to die every day is to pulse
music. to be kid who leans against book
more than people. to be book as it opens,
closes, folds in on itself, on same
paragraph. to be underlined stanza
whose body bursts syntax scars naked.

Love body when it emblazons
family curse, when you are bad joke
at table, when you are shuffled scrapes of forks,
weirdo told shut up, forsaken.

Let lonely make lens so clear you become intergalactic.
Let residue be blanket you shed every season.
Let you be blessing no one understands.
Let your gaze be salve, sign of cross.
Let you be words stranger waits for.
Let love be bunker you crawl into.
Let you guffaw, let you cackle.
Let you be last one left.
Let you be last one.
Let you be last.
Let you be.
Let you.
Let.

When you’re well into your 30s and you have no heat in the entire
building and you loath that actually you’re used to this, that poverty
had been a training, poverty was a practice imposed on you since
childhood. So somehow, small-you knows how to keep warm
when it’s 5 °F outside with blankets towering a fort on your bed.
Yes, you’ve called & reported & notified sources to get the heat
back on. That’s not the point. What you remember as a child
is reading at candlelight or small space heaters you pretended
were robots or re-starting the electrical fuse when a space heater
took too much juice. You remember your mom crying a couple
times, looking over at your freezing grandparents, all of them
cloaked in the same formula: a hoodie, scarves, bubble jacket,
defeat. She continued to boil water for steam on all the stove
burners and with shivering hands ma would mumble, “we left
home for this? We left home for this?” She would cup her
hands blowing breath and each exhale felt like a wish to return.
And your grandparents just sighed & rocked each other in the
basement. All of us wearing starter jackets, the same kind ma
would sell along with phone cards to her kababayan as yet another
side hustle. You, a curious child who knew there was another
home but had never been there yet—would walk over and ask
your mama, hug her tightly, would nudge your grandparents
and hold their worn hands, to tell them about their home,
and so they did. The waiting hours became tides of the beach,
sunglow sweat, harmony of palm tree leaves catching wind,
endless fishing boats dragging nets that appeared to be its
own kind of cursive in sand. There we were, everyone huddled
in the smallest circle in a Chicago northwest apartment, waiting
for it to get warmer, waiting for our bodies to feel home again.

diaspora love is to say, meet me on mott st., turn on doyers st., and wait in line for half an hour. okay. maybe an hour. not touch each other, but plan what dumplings to eat. not say a thing, but talk about hand pulled noodles, order two steamed pork buns, one for now, and another for later after we build a real appetite. watch one another pull apart soft dough made by women’s hands right at sunrise. before that, i’m in a meeting where a white lady tells me how i don’t even sound filipino. before that, you are not thanked for the ways you do all the work among men. we read the headlines and see bodies like ours but never hear our names pronounced correctly, if ever. all our people clean the houses or build the buildings or bake the bread, and we should be so grateful for this immaculate booth, upholstered in red, so grateful for the diplomas, and the crying between airport gates, see how we’ve made it. i send money back home without envelopes now, it’s done all online via cellphone. you go back to harlem, translate papers to parents. my mouth waters over chive parcels as you reach for the greens, chopsticks pick apart piles of leaves from stems as they sit in the salt of oyster sauce. we talk shop. we claim our worth. together, we order more chili oil and think, this chili oil is hot?—we rub our bellies under the table, still hungry, and smile as if to mean, y’all ain’t tasted anything yet.

A Novel Idea: A Pioneering Writer Feature with Charlie Jane Anders

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford, and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. She’s also the author of a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke…

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Tami Bell at College

Love, she’d heard about—talks late into the night, with a feverish exchange beyond body and habit that could not wait. This was college. This was why Tami had studied and sweat and done all those churchy service projects: to arrive here, at the juncture of knowledge and experience. Out the back-seat window frisbees flew, footbags…

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Untitled Poem

First a speckled white and brown foalwas born out the side of the snowmeltwith an old autumn knife tucked into its coat Next Samantha had a dreamin which a person not exactly me inhabitedmy body and wrapped the newborn lamb in a blanket And though the foal grew as the last of the packedsnow-blanket receded…

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Breaking Ground: A Debut Author Feature with Kate Weinberg

F (r)iction is elated to introduce our readers to Kate Weinberg and her debut novel, The Truants. Released in late January from Putnam, The Truants is being hailed as “One of the best thriller debuts in recent years…” (Kirkus Reviews) and “a remarkably assured debut, deftly plotted…with vivid, compelling characters that leap off the page.”…

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the ghosts we are and the ghosts we will become

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Z28

There’s a car you fall in love with. It’s the first car you see after your friends tell you you should love cars. The car is an Iroc Z28. You know this because the name Iroc and letter Z and number 28 are printed on the rocker panel. You love everything about the lettering because…

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Fairgrounds: A Feature with Lambda Literary

Founded in 1991, Lambda Literary believes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer literature is fundamental to the preservation of our culture, and that LGBTQ lives are affirmed when our stories are written, published, and read. A kind of purring, outside the sill in a bright morning, so bright it’s as though something in the sky…

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Matchstick 66

You’re on historic Route 66 heading east toward Las Vegas. You come up the backside of Barstow. This is the dead side.Part of you is excited by driving the lost highways that connect San Diego to Las Vegas. A mock-gonzo pilgrimage to the capital of Fear and Loathing, to the land where the American Dream…

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The Fairytale My Favorite Editor Rejected

I wanted to write a fairy tale about fracking. The tale would include special creatures, frack-fairies, with seven-syllable chemical superpowers and tiny parcels of invisible frack-dust said to cover the meadows at midnight. There would be magical events, Frackfests, that occur when stars shoot up from cracks in the earth’s crust and the ground dances…

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The Little Prince

Elijah had curly hair that was slumber-pressed flat in the back but loose in the front. He would often absentmindedly squeeze between his fingers the fat, sandy-brown curls that hung over his moonstone eyes. He knew from Grandma Nell, his mother’s mother, that he was mulatto. He’d heard her say so when she introduced him…

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