I am sure that everyone in my familia really enjoys flan.
But not me.
May I please taste the glazed churro,
the timeless cochito (con café and cream) or the delicate
tres leche cake.

He gazes at me large-eyed as I flip through the album pages of the tinged-with-age black-and-white photographs. I hoist him over my shoulder, pat his back gently for a burp and continue to peruse images of myself—baby me cradled in my father’s arms as I now cradle my son, three-year old me uncomfortably groomed and garbed for a birthday party…

You want my love but don’t want my pain,
My sunshine, but not my rain.
Can’t you see how that’s driving me insane?

At first, the black lines cast by the window bars of the drunk tank were a mystery, and the pain in his body a specter. Then the shadows became the field plots of the Llano Estacado he had crossed on his run from Louisiana.

No one was quite sure what to make of Mary Whemple’s behavior. For the past two weeks, she had spent all of her lunch breaks standing at the entrance of her office building, arms spread, eyes closed, and her wrinkled face tilted to the sky.

Gwen and I looked up at the crystal doors we approached. They must have been twenty feet high and twelve wide, and emblazoned across them, the letters IT in that famous logo. Without a whisper, the doors opened. That’s not the right word. They simply vanished.

One winter afternoon, Nick Miracle walked out of Perk Up Coffee with a caramel ribbon crunch latte, his drink of choice on special occasions. For the past five years, he had been a junior loan officer at Wabash River Bank. Beginning tomorrow, he would manage its Honey Creek branch.

Charlotte’s dad is gone. If it weren’t for king-size candy bars, she would have realized sooner. But he disappeared while she’s eying the grocery store candy. It’s so much better here, which is why they always stop when they visit him on the god-damned island.
That’s what her mom calls it. Then Charlotte makes her put a dollar in the swear jar.

There were too many places to sit. That’s what Dorothy thought when they’d moved into the house in 1964, trading in what Lester had called their “starter home” for something bigger and grander. What had they thought they were starting? A family, a full life ahead of them.

There is space on the edge of language where it is quiet but far from empty. It is the space where life is at it should be. I happened upon it by chance one summer between my first and second year of legal existence while scratching at the wall next to my crib on the first floor of the Au Style Modern’ tailoring shop in the village of Tauves in the Auvergne region of France.

The light was creeping in around the edges of the curtains, so she knew it was time to get up. Grandma wouldn’t mind now. The sun was up so she could be up too. This was a sleepover, and now that the sleeping part was over, the fun could begin.

A rider was drawing closer, through the light fog rising from the forested hills around Stockton. The ladies had initially considered the pursuer as merely another gallivant taking some exercise, but the man on the horse was taking no leisurely route, rather a direct line toward their carriage.
“Have no fear,” said the coachman. “I am a tolerable shot at a hundred feet.”

The first time I saw St. Peter’s
magnificent marble and lack of time-
pieces, I dismayed my travel

partner with an obvious observation;
a trifling truism: that it reminded me of a casino
welcoming the hopeful riff-raff

B E A B I G K I D A N D O N O TC R Y ‍ i squeeze ma’s hands tighter as we walk out of the funeral home sunshine hits my face with heat i lift my face up to the sun and squint the sunlight and tears on my face are hot and cold at the same time it feels funny i look at ma the strings from her glasses sway as we walk tears hang on the bottom of her chin

“Can we talk?”
He sounds almost too forceful in his delivery, the tone of his voice transforming his question into an attack, so he selects his next set of words deliberately, knowing he’d only have one shot at his opening.

reaching across, hand into the blackberry bush,
a walk from where we were down to the sea,
a small bay, of pebbles & the incoming swell of the water,
listening for the rhythm, as if it might be the key to writing

Going to art therapy puts my anxiety into overdrive. I don’t have the patience for painting, not even for the five-minute figure studies, and I’m not here at these sessions because I respond so well to criticism. The coffee dispenser is practically bottomless, though. It’s never good coffee, obviously; it’s free and unlimited; by my eighth cup I start to feel like I’m someone else, which, to my understanding, is the point of being here.

After spending a year in Northern Spain with my father’s sister’s family, I reunited with my parents and siblings in Bogotá, Colombia, instead of our home in Los Angeles, California. My parents were starting over again from scratch and setting up shop to establish themselves. Mom, who was a perpetual optimist, had recently hit the jackpot, and with an endless display of excitement she was paying-off debts, shopping for new home furniture, and preparing for my milestone birthday celebration.

How can something
come out of nothing,
let alone the universe?

But that is what contemporary
theory of cosmology proclaims—

If Mina stared long and hard enough at the harsh fluorescent lighting, she could disappear into the abyss of all the other times she burned under its harsh whiteness–she could forget where she was, how old she was, who she was. Mina wondered if these self-proclaimed staring contests with the lights were the cause of her headaches, or if there was something actually wrong with her.

I was too tired to even squeegee the shower glass door on a recent May morning. Just the day before, my husband Jon and I had set up my solo exhibit at the Ledyard Gallery on the second floor of the Howe Library in Hanover, New Hampshire. I was fatigued by the physical effort of moving art over the previous week and a half as I had also delivered paintings to a few additional locations in my home state of Vermont. The real tired came from completing the goal. The task.

Seeing blurred writing
on an abstract painting
brings me right back

to begging you to teach me
to read before I went to school

My name is Saghani, which means Raven in our tongue. Some say with a name like that, I’ve been cursed since the day I was born. Perhaps they are right.
At eighteen years of age, I was already a widow, gathering fish from the nets alongside the other members of the widows’ colony, knee-deep in the frigid water of the Nilak River.

…skyward, lying on our backs listening for rainfall,
lying, we the ones of loitering, of settling into the longing for dreams to overtake us,
asking if anything could overtake us,
this overwhelming desire, this yearning for…