Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
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From the Archives
Features • Winter 2011 - Blueprint
When I was eleven there was a real push in my family to build a deck over our backyard, out from the kitchen on the second floor. This was a real motion, like the time when my father said that he was considering getting a dog for my brother and me, though that never actually materialized. But the building of the deck looked real, obstacled only by the old-man berry tree in the garden plot and the basketball hoop whose base was filled with sand. Joe, who lived next door, had promised to help us build it. Or else he knew a guy.
Building a deck meant staying on Avenue R for a summer, a real decision because usually my parents, teachers, saved what they could so we could go away for a few weeks while we were all off school. Both of them had travelled extensively in their youth and it was something of a tradition. This was a priority, more important than new furniture, or painting the kitchen, or going out to dinner. But to build a deck we’d need to stay put for a while, to save the travel money, at least for a year or two.
Joe had been advocating the construction of a deck in our backyard for years, in no small part because he couldn’t wait to be the one who personally cut down the berry tree. It was on the edge of our backyard, right next to the fence, meaning that, to be fair, at least half of it grew over into Joe’s own property. The snow in the winter made the branches crack and fall and in the summer, berries: ones that no amount of scrubbing the carpet or yelling at rulebreakers to take their shoes off could help. Though they smelled wonderful when crushed, purple and everlasting.
Building a deck was serious business on Avenue R, still is. There is an alleyway that runs behind our backyards that was built, so they say, for the garbage trucks to come through and do their business. Which means that we have this illusion of space, enclosed by fences, backyards jutting out to a long asphalt alleyway even in the middle of Brooklyn. We have our berry tree. Most of the houses have basketball hoops and in the alley we play football, tackle, when it snows. The houses touch on either side and Avenue R at our front entrances rumbles citylike by, but out here, where the deck would go, it feels like perpetual country summer. My mother swears that it’s ten degrees more temperate “in the back.”
Which is why everyone wants a deck, to double their living space, to extend their second floors into the outdoors, to have this little quiet area to take the sun and barbecue and listen to Spanish radio. The couple on the end hangs their laundry there. The next one over has lots of plants and vines. Joe on our immediate right has a nice and simple one, just the barbecue and a few lawn chairs, but he likes to stand for hours at the edge of his and watch what’s going on, up and down the alleyway, like at the helm of a ship.
What’s going on Joe?
Nothing, nothing.
Same old.
Same old, he says.
*
When Joe was younger he was a cop. Those were tough days to wear blue, back in the sixties. Some people liked you, sure, but you also had lots of enemies. It didn’t help if your last name was Castellano. He told me that he’d only had to draw his gun once, thank God, but had never shot it, though there were some chases, and guns pulled on him.
There’s a story he sometimes tells that everyone used to know in the city, though most people have forgotten now, about when a city councilman brought a friend into City Hall, and no one patted him down. And then the friend took his place up in the gallery, and stood up and took a shot at the city councilman on the floor. But the real part of the story, what’s crazy, is that there was a cop, a regular police detective, who was plainclothes in the lower level: and he took one look up at the shooter and shot him, surrounded by people, dead, one bullet. It’s a great and gruesome story, but I particularly like the way that Joe tells it: with great sensitivity to the angle of the police detective’s shot, how he was from below, the jutting out of the upper balcony, the levered supports, the force of gravity. These are things he took into consideration when he built his own deck, or oversaw the guys doing it, I forget which: for Joe it amounts to the same thing, him maintaining a terrible disdain for people who can’t or won’t do their own work.
Joe has a lot of respect for the United States Army and fond memories of his days serving in part because it allowed him to get to Europe as a young man, the only time he ever traveled. He was stationed in Germany for a while after the war: not so much fighting as policing, or giving tours, wherever they went. But this seems to have done it for him: he’s satisfied with what he’s seen. The extended family comes to Avenue R on holidays, when his wife Angie cooks enormous dinners at the stove in the kitchen overlooking the deck. He doesn’t like to stay overnight in other places, doesn’t even like to drive so much anymore—once he told me a terrifying story about how sometimes red lights look green to him. Yeah you know, they just look green? he said. It didn’t seem to bother him too much. He likes his time at home.
*
The thing about a deck on Avenue R is that it stands for stationary. These things aren’t quite legal, by city law, and they cost a lot to do, so it’s not like you’d just move out a couple of years after the last two-by-four’s put down. Decks are for summer afternoons, for people to sit on deck chairs and look up at the smog. From here the cars on the other side of the houses sound like rushing water, or waves, just like you’re on a beach. There aren’t many restaurants in this part of Brooklyn because everyone cooks their own dinners, then eat them out on the decks, staggering dinnertimes so neighbors don’t overlap. The Q train is a car-ride away, so getting into the city is hard—easier to stay out here and relax.
The older my brother and I got on Avenue R, the more decks there were. When we were little there was just the one that was a homerun if you hit a Whiffle ball on top. Then they started popping up like Bloomberg campaign posters. We kept putting it off. Next year, next year. That summer when I was eleven or so was the culmination. There were heated discussions about the construction: my father especially didn’t want to be tethered down. He’d always loved the city across the river and wanted to be as close to it as possible. This was a distant second. This was the year my uncle died, and I remember peering from the stairwell and watching my mother say to the mirror: My world is falling apart.
We never built a deck behind our house and in a way it’s good, because then there’d be five decks in a row with no separation, and we’d really be stepping on each others’ toes. But somehow it signifies that we haven’t put our roots down yet, even though my brother and I have lived here all our lives. We’re afraid to. There’s something of the frightened nomad in us. We could leave anytime. We’d leave nothing behind.
To build a deck, first you have to measure and lay out the site. You have to install the ledger, and pour the footings, and set the posts. There is a point in the middle of the process where you lay the decking. Then the railings, then the sweet-smelling paint that keeps the thing from rotting away. I can imagine Joe building it with me. I can see Joe with a t-shirt tucked into his pants, tossing me a bottle of water, asking me why I went away. Everything’s here. You can even keep the goddamn tree, if you want: it’ll just be a short deck.
I love that tree, the berries, the face of an old man growing out the middle of the trunk. I used to love looking at it when we’d park the car in the backyard after some trip. While Dad got the bags out of the back I’d stand in front of it and let it scare me a little. The face always looks like it’s yelling. I’d stick a twig inside its mouth. Home, I’d say.
Fiction • Commencement 2014
There was something about Peter’s clothes that attracted the moths. It was his scent, he thought. It had changed: there was some new chemical he released into the air. His most recent bedmates had com-mented on the aroma of his skin.
“Like Sweet Tarts,” one had said.
“Like dill,” said another.
He noted that certain of his clothes -- his cashmere cardigan, originally his father’s, and his red cotton shirt -- were especially popular among the insects. His shirt had been wearable until holes began to proliferate around the nipple area; Peter quartered the shirt and added the pieces to his pile of cleaning rags under the kitchen sink. Others evinced signs of life: a collar, burrowed-through, an opening in the armpit, a bundle of loosening threads. Peter did not mind much. He liked the way the moth-holes made him look worn, old, professorial. (He was only, in fact, a young lecturer in English.) At night, as he read by lamplight, pen in hand and cold stout on a coaster next to him, he would be pleasantly distracted by a moth beating about his head, wedging itself in the gutter of his book, landing on his shoulder to lay, he presumed without feeling the need to discover, many eggs. Looking down the bridge of his nose through his wire-rimmed glasses, Peter would continue to read, stopping once or twice to shoo the moth away from his pages.
He lived with the Colonel, a grey and black tabby he had adopted from his last lover. Gerard was from Arles, where the Colonel had fed on live mice, fish bones, and goat’s milk. He had stalked birds in the street and meandered among Roman ruins, which bore graffiti by teenagers tired of their city’s age value. In Peter’s small apartment crammed with books, the Colonel paced back and forth in the living room, bored and angry. He expressed his frustration by refusing to use the litter box to defecate, unburdening himself, instead, on the sheets of paper strewn across the floor near Peter’s writing desk. In the mornings, the Colonel would leap onto the kitchen counter and snatch the bread that popped out of the toaster. Peter usually left the toast to the cat, but had taken to guarding his breakfast cereal with a butter knife as he ate and read the paper.
The moths were the Colonel’s only entertainment and solace. He began to sit in front of the television whenever Peter turned it on; he knew the insects were attracted to the light. When the moths neared the bright screen, he would jump and deftly pluck them out of the air, his fur standing on end from the television’s static. He also spent more time around Peter, who could be trusted to have at least two moths circling his body at any moment. Peter, however, misinterpreted the Colonel’s proximity as an indication of their budding friendship.
For the most part, they lived together peaceably -- Peter, the Colonel, and the moths. Man and cat both missed Gerard, who had left suddenly after having lived with Peter in his apartment for almost a year. He had left with very little: one suitcase which, inconveniently, did not roll, for that was the retrograde style of the day; and his straw hat, which was recognizable by its broad brim and thin black ribbon. Everything had been packed before breakfast, before Peter woke.
Fiction • Fall 2015
Lucy hasn’t been able to get even a word in with her boyfriend Tom and she’s just about had enough, though of course the birthday boy was always going to be the center of attention, birthday aside, what with the moody indigo blazer and the black button down and bolo tie and the fake golden crown to which he’s glued a plastic eyeball where the center jewel ought to be, with his charismatic conversational virtuosity and his sizable mental library of anecdotes and his appetite for attention. Here’s a little bit about Lucy: Lucy’s got those big eyes that turn heads and inspire double-takes, eyes complexly hazel with droplets of jealous green and melancholic blue mixed in those oceanic irides; her aesthetic can best be described as carefully careless, though tonight she’s paid particular attention to the first part, strutting her stuff in her tea-length shimmering dress with a pattern like the night sky and her bold eyeliner decisions; she’s exceptionally pretty but doesn’t feel that way about herself, and because of this she’s got a complicated relationship with compliments and mirrors, to give you a sense of the girl.
Poetry • Winter 2014 - Trial
Comes on and quickly: A thin worm slips sylphlike
into the inner ear and spirals to line the cochlea
in coil, rests, bloats and distends, widens cavity
walls, bloats down to the throat and my head cocks
under its weight. My evening shadow clutches, clasps
a tuft of hair pulling me toward her, serving
as further proof that shadows want flesh to buckle slump, stretch
horizontal to sow substance where there is none. Especially up-market,
up high and uphill, this soil swills envy and its variations.
The torque saddles my spleen and my legs move like crabs,
corybantic and feral to stand in for gravity and the plane.
*Dear shade, dear daemon, do not muster, do not envy.*
With this motion I descend, towed. A shipping heir
gifts me a bouquet. Tucks one sanguine rose behind my ear.
My teeth tear at the rose-tops. The pluck not mine, I cannot stop.
There is nothing precious about the periphery and
molars are equally useless if they fall out. *Let go please**
* *shadow sister watch me swear you one wisdom tooth.*
Unstead unbalanced I bare my rose-stained teeth
with foreign fury, spit the petals and hurl the stems. Descending, nearing
the port now. *Please loosen your grip we are *one *you* one *I*.
The shipping heir follows. Asks a merchant seaman for
aniseed boiled in water and left on the stovetop of Commerce.
The seaman asks his nursing wife who asks
what for. Is this heart-ache or is this worm-
wood lodged under or has it reached the ear.
White linen is most beautiful stained with attar
and umber—when it speaks for itself—for what unstained
is ever permanent? On this ashy shore I have no resolve or
resolution. Drive is driven. *We must hurtle together regardless*.
*Our history is express, likewise our en-
* *rapture. *Respect’s deckhand once carried a para-
sol, which has since rusted over in the aromatic
nothing we will soon be glad to remember
with clarity. *Sister Anise, sister shadow, I am spinning.*
*Retrograde. In sand. Crab-like legs one needle.*
With the three spins before the gyroscope falls
its needle traces my name in the ash-sand.
When the rim touches down my orb-skull cracks.
Captive liquid falls in tears, which fill the cursive:
a self-portrait too sad to admit agency and yet
this is a flavor I have wrung myself. A flavor
for which I have obtained a Protected Designation
of Origin which means what I choose will choose
to swell inside me and it always tastes how it was made.
This flavor is black but brilliant, the incan-
descent paragon of lustre and forgetting
*taste my parsley of enmity, an-*
*imus, anisum.* I taste acquired
like black licorice or leucorrhea.
Like ouzo in brine,* I drink you,* like:
Umbilical. Milk that’s pressed from stalks.
Umbellifer. Milk of noontime, milk that calls me back.
Umbra. Milk of malice, milk that soothes no aches.
A wild wheel leaking prone like spleen: seed and sown.
Features • Fall 2016
You are new to Georgetown when you arrive the first week of June. All you see are rainbows—flags of them, banners, geotags, advertisements, merchandise. Restaurants and clothing stores covered in streamers fluttering heavily in the thick humid air. It’s kind of South, you think, but Georgetown is so beautiful. Your mother had said, “Don’t walk alone here, people will wonder what you’re doing in this place.” She has already trained you to make a habit out of being very good. She thought it would protect your body from all the people who wanted to break it. But here in Georgetown, flags waving, colors streaming, you explore sidewalks in the daytime, awe-filled and fearless.
The museum you work at is only a few minutes away from your apartment. All the walking reminds you of Cambridge, blessed Cambridge, your real home; all the walking makes you feel good, like you can breathe again after the monotony of sleeping, eating, and staying awake. Long Island’s suburbs are wooded, bleak, and empty. When you step outside there is silence. When you sit inside you turn on the TV and leave it going for hours, even when you’ve gone downstairs, even when you’ve gone to bed. Only nature, disordered, suffocating the skies, motivates you to sometimes bask in the quiet.
The museum is surrounded by gardens. Google Maps doesn’t recognize any of them so they are unnavigable on the first and second tries. Your boss gives you a tour one evening after work, pointing at fountains and identifying trees as you lag behind, swatting at mosquitoes. He says, “The founder modeled this one after Eastern spirituality, all the rage at the time,” and you remember all the teenage Buddhists you fell in love with in high school. When he starts moving again you pause in the center, sigh inwardly and swear that someday you will marry someone interested in landscaping these kinds of things in white-fenced backyards. On your way home in the afternoons you see millennials jogging, parents walking children back from school. Whenever you pass people pushing baby strollers you conjure up a family here in D.C., with all its rainbow madness, and picture your rearranged future.
The citizens around are almost always neighbors, because the apartment building is about ten minutes away from 32nd Street. You love the apartment, its coziness, the biggest bed you’ve ever slept in alone. You like the ease but also the independence, and the proximity of the streets. They can be yours—as you take photos of decorations on shop windows, tripping over tourists and beggars and large groups of people—*this can be your city.*
But your streets black out beneath you in the nighttime, heading back to the apartment alone or on a muggy morning through an isolated walkway. Here in Georgetown proper, *Blue Neighbourhood *on repeat in your ears, the streets tell you to be scared of ghosts: men lurking on sidewalks darkened by trees, hiding behind bushes, smoking on their front steps. The streets tell you not to scare the woman walking her dog at nine p.m., because you are black in this background, so black and so frightening, all 5’5 of you wheezing uphill in Old Navy shorts and a three-dollar tank top. The revelations come in pieces, visions on your way to work in the morning: there are no black hands unlocking these doors, no black children skipping past the gardens, no black women taking their toddlers into the Dumbarton Park. On a daytrip to Howard the campus shows off its mecca of dark-skinned, thick-limbed girls and you want to sigh with all of them, bring them back to Georgetown, condemn the R street suffering together.
Thewaterfront is where you feel okay staring shamelessly in a way you have not since childhood. It is a boring place, full of wooden bridges and ducks in waves and festive people drinking coolers on speedboats. You lean longingly over the edge of the deck, imagining the kissing, drunken motions, *Oh Wonder* and *The 1975* floating softly above the Potomac. Someday when you are rich enough to live in Georgetown you will take your family to eat seafood here and your children will play in the fountains. Someday the streets will not run so old under your feet, and the heat will feel like home, and your partner will fold their fingers into yours on the way, the softness of their smooth palm colliding with your aged, weather-beaten life lines. You will make space for them on the sidewalk, as you make space for all the upper class people of Georgetown with nothing to do in the heavy heat of summer. You will make yourself smaller so that you do not frighten the women by accidentally brushing against their shoulders, or stumbling beside them, or turning their way. Close your eyes and face another direction.
Mother’s sights are set on the boroughs. She calls from the Bronx and it’s almost like 9/11 in real time, a natural disaster you can actually remember, when she says, “Hillary Clinton paves the way for you.” You get goosebumps washing lettuce in the kitchen. Over the sink you tear up for your fourteen-year old self who somehow found meaning in the state of New York and slowly, desperately, wanted to be President.
“But will they like you?” somebody had asked you, and still today you’re not sure what that means.
The wonderful people working with you are well-liked and they are all from other states: Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Texas. They don’t care about Long Island. They coax you in front of laptops and squish together with you on tiny couches and lead you on the rocky trail towards the beautiful parts of the gardens. Your foreignness isn’t hefty all the time. The sun goes down but 30th rustles life, sound of cars about to crash, and your hands, cupping aimlessly at fireflies on the window screen, bleeding all the world’s ambitions down against the waving branches.
Here slammed into fact [you are too new here] and history [they say you built Washington underground], you visit museums with the wonderful people and everything you know and love becomes invisible. You become invisible when you can’t find your stories in captions, when your face is rubbed out of black and white photographs. At the museum you fall centuries behind, nauseated by the sight of the original American flag and the thought of taking your children to see it. Over the weekend one person murders forty-nine people and your mother on the phone says, “Nobody ever *really* accepts the deviants.” You are tolerated by Abraham Lincoln on his throne, casting shadows on the lawn, and by the soldiers who keep giving themselves; you trace plaques and think, *For what? *any time the cameras flash. You are tolerated by the people of Georgetown, glancing up for proof of your existence with their bare eyes, afraid to touch with their bare hands. A homeless black man shouts, “Hey gorgeous, hey gorgeous,” and you remember standing in front of the mirror in the museum bathroom, witness to your own emasculation, hating the flimsy nature of bodies. M Street sneaks through you. M Street calls you Little Girl and Woman all at the same time. M Street violates you. Swallows your spouse whole in its cobblestones.
In the gardens, dry-eyed among the gods and the angels, you get tired so fast worrying about being broke and unloved. There are fancy grownups drinking wine out of plastic cups, elegant ladies sitting on the grass against their husbands, bees swarming the flowers behind them. Evening sets. You go back to good friends, food in the apartment, love on the opposite side of the coast. Mother calls, says, “Find a Catholic church.” She wouldn’t understand why you take photos of political posters on Sunday mornings, tiptoeing alongside the highway underneath the pride flags fluttering over the Hilton hotel. June is coming to an end and you are waiting for everyone to shatter; you snap a picture of hydrangeas tumbling over a gate top and learn that this house costs six million dollars. *Will I, *you wonder, *at this moment, get arrested for Possession of Otherworldly Image?*
At the station a black woman is crying, weave in a bandana, makeup smearing. Rare on this block, new in this city, which is old as the world. You do not want to be her but you do not know what to think of your hair, hidden beneath smoldering twists, or your naked cheeks and forehead, charcoaling by the minute. She can’t see your eyes through your very tinted glasses. Instead of watching her you swivel to stare up at a statue of Gandhi: “I’ve been to India,” you’d joked. “Where’s the geotag for the Embassy?”
But again, within the Circle, you shove in your earphones, blast *The Life of Pablo, *and remember the museum fences glinting under the sunlight. The wonderful people like listening to pop. The wonderful people sit beside you in an Uber as you discuss Chance the Rapper with the black driver who talks too much. He brings up gentrification, as the two of you exist only incidentally in this country, reminded to make space for other people—rich lives, blue lives, all lives. He mentions Freddie Gray, as your bodies are so prone to breakage.
“Yes,” you respond. A fact of life, this unfortunate condition.
Another fact: the death.
When Alton Sterling is killed and you can’t bear to look at the monuments any longer, bleeding for “EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW,” bleeding for your unborn sons and daughters who will be black because of you, Georgetown keeps on shining in the morning. Black nannies fixing pigtails on the sidewalk. Black security guards staring at you when you walk into stores. Black women huddled in corners, distraught like the crying woman in DuPont Circle, begging bare-backed on the street. Your masculinity is a kind that still leaves you enchained and so you no longer know how to cry when you need to. The tears fail to come a thousand times, reading Huffington Post at work, taking snap chats of the Library of Congress. They shoot Philando Castile the next day. It is a Thursday. You worry that someday God will give you a son.
Once you step out onto 30th you are back in Georgetown and making everyone uncomfortable with your quiet grief. Illegal, even when you’re not on these streets. Painfully new, again.
2026