Three Poems

What you really need right now is that hong shao rou recipe.Not the one in the Times your bougie budsMartha Stewarted the shit out ofblowing half their take homes at the Ferry Building. No, the one you need is the one your Ma sharedthat time you fought in New May Wahthat time she showed youthe difference between dark and…

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Body, In Motion

Fifteen / 1996 / Secret Church Camp Bunk Party There was a misunderstanding—it was James who was invited, not Robert James, but he showed up anyway and people liked him enough not to make a fuss as he stood in the corner of the bunkhouse that smelled like cedarwood and cheap vodka. There were only eight of them, including…

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The Pearl Growers

I was twenty-two the first time it happened. My father slapped me so hard that I bit my cheek open and a thin trickle of blood spilled over my tongue while he stood there, jaw locked, holding the pearl in his hand. He looked at it, not me, his eyes only for the smear of light…

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The Body Eccentric

Bodies… we all have one. They are literally a part of each of us! (Yes, we went there.) We should, as the idiom goes, “know them like the backs of our hands.” And yet, the truth is that our bodies hold a whole mess of mysteries, and quite a few of them, we take for granted every single day. Let’s take a look at five baffling body enigmas: The Body…

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Editor’s Note

Dear lovely reader, There’s a weighing scale in the locker room of my gym that haunts us all. Throughout the years, I’ve seenpeople step on it and start crying. At the end of a sweat-drenched cardio session, someone will stumble onto it, their eyebrows furrowed at the unmoved number, then limp right back to the…

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