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 • Spring 2024
Parul Sehgal calls herself ‘congenitally secretive’ and her work ‘conspiratorial.’ She describes writing as ‘secreting shameful sentences’ and reading as ‘subversive’ and ‘stolen.’ Teju Cole once called her a ‘good smuggler.’ On a Monday afternoon in almost-spring, both of us late on our deadlines, Sehgal welcomes me into collusion.
Poetry • Winter 2013 - Origin
I sing of arms and the man whom fate had sent
To exile from the shores of Troy to be
The first to come to Lavinium and the coasts
Of Italy, and who, because of Juno’s
Savage implacable rage, was battered by storms
At sea, and from the heavens above, and also
Tempests of war, until at last he might
Build there his city and bring his gods to Latium,
From which would come the Alban Fathers and
The lofty walls of Rome. Muse, tell me
The cause why Juno the queen of heaven was so
Aggrieved by what offence against her power,
To send this virtuous faithful hero out
To perform so many labors, confront such dangers?
Can anger like this be, in immortal hearts?
There was an ancient city known as Carthage
(Settled by men from Tyre), across the sea
And opposite to Italy and the mouth
Of the Tiber river; very rich, and fierce,
Experienced in warfare. Juno, they say,
Loved Carthage more than any other place
In the whole wide world, more even than Samos.
Here’s where she kept her chariot and her armor.
It was her fierce desire, if fate permitted, that
Carthage should be chief city of the world.
But she had heard that there would come a people,
Engendered of Trojan blood, who would some day
Throw down the Tyrian citadel, a people
Proud in warfare, rulers of many realms,
Destined to bring down Libya. Thus it was
That the Parcae’s turning wheel foretold the story.
Fearful of this and remembering the old
War she had waged at Troy for her dear Greeks,
And remembering too her sorrow and her rage
Because of Paris’s insult to her beauty,
Remembering her hatred of his people,
And the honors paid to ravished Ganymede –
For all these causes her purpose was to keep
The Trojan remnant who’d survived the Greeks
And pitiless Achilles far from Latium,
On turbulent waters wandering, year after year,
Driven by fates across the many seas.
So formidable the task of founding Rome.
Fiction • Spring 2015
Aiden's porn addiction began, unsurprisingly, with porn. For the first fifteen years of his life—or really just the past three, in this context—he'd had to make do with his imagination, a few war-torn issues of *Penthouse *inherited from Uncle Rico, and a copy of Anaïs Nin's *Delta of Venus *that his parents had overlooked in their curation of the family shelves.
Poetry • Summer 2020
for Allison
All lovers feel like they’re inventing
something. How else would we work
out the kinks? I am in awe of your
pussy. You said it appears like I am
doing an inspection. True. True.
I lift the hood. I study your anatomy
of flowers and fruit. Mixing food with
sex disgusts you. You hate cantaloupe
and the texture of cherries. Once, you
had a nightmare about being force-fed
grapes. Your eyes change colors when
you laugh. There goes the secret life of
green, witch hazel spells of black magic.
You encourage me to keep climbing as I,
a heathen hymn, teach you the taxonomy
of touch. You, a table of plenty, show me
how to paint by numbers. One is never
enough. Two: my lips at your neck. Another
two: the sound of my name—twin flame
of your own. Four: your hands around my
ankles. I present you with pansies and lilac.
This poem is a form of praise and worship.
In years lived, you’re on page twenty-eight,
and I on page thirty-two. I hope that you
survive me, I do not ever want to go without.
Poetry • Winter 2016 - Danger
I am that comet you all have cursed,
in the dark void drifting aimless and unsettled.
Love me like an avenger's lost
last chance at revenge.
I am that person whose shadow was carved on the tree,
and from that day on taken for dead.
Love me like a hallucination
in a crazed killer's fevered brain.
I am that wheat that Heaven too has singed with fire,
that has shivered even from the dog days' sunlight.
Love me like a masochist.
As you cherish reason when the unreasonable surround you.
I am that wolf whose cold bright bones the witch doctor holds in her hand.
To soil, to air, to flame, to water I will scatter like a spell.
Love me like miracles not seen even when sun and moon align
in the sixth degree under the sign of the ram.
August 25, 2004, Ürümchi
*Translated from the Uyghur by Joshua L. Freeman. See another of his translations *
*in the Advocate [here](../../../../article/563/old-era-or-wolf-girl/). *
* *
Poetry • Commencement 2014
In the end, all maps, self-led by vestigial scent,
melted or forgotten, caressing their digital sisters—
the ones with aptitudes, subtracting the call of danger—fail
to render. The mapmaker pretends to engross in
topography, moves out of state, divorces & takes
up with a sultry 3rd dimension, sprawling in her loft & breathing
cigarettes of middling price & quality. They make love.
Sibling to yawning July, the drought built to last.
The photographer skirts the outskirts, compiling as he
pleases: their streets, their sisters, the upset grass,
the amoebae in the sky—always so far?
He learns that content & content
are not always the same; his sister morphs into
a mailbox (empty). I have no interest in the Messiah, he says,
unless He creeps into Street View
rifling his leaflets & then I’d have to digitally scan Him.
The 3-D version, still in development,
will include an immersive Danger Zone—
we can’t get to Syria, except by the News,
which is a different design—
there is no tab, a simulation will have to suffice:
the pucker of loosened gravity,
the click & drag & drag & drag . . .
The photographer, which is us, spares no one,
remembers his father mostly for the cigarettes,
he bridges the gaps in memory with real dyslexia.
What street, what ‘burb could surmount the creeping din:
explosions of nothing, words of nothing,
each surveyed road calling ghosts too stupid,
too gone to cry out: Google Map for a Google Earth?
Somewhere out west, two hours from where he was conceived,
then born, then switched into a long range
of broken sisters, the cropped shadows, chopped pixels,
he sees another. I have too many grounds yet to cover, he says,
I am misunderstood.
2026