Fiction & Poetry

“I am afraid, I say / as I look up.”

She could sit on a bench in Europe completely unmolested, without a single human being saying a word to her, until the sun fell out of the sky.

“I’ve been writing down the whispers / of a stopped clock.”

I was simply happy to inhabit my birthplace, my janmasthan: this almost unbearably meaningful fact that linked me to every red letter box and double-decker bus.

The author reads her story from the July 7 & 14, 2025, issue of the magazine.

He was nothing and nobody, and nobody cared, and he thought that everyone was watching him, that even I was watching him.

The poet joins Kevin Young to read and discuss “Half-Life in Exile,” by Hala Alyan, and her own poem “On Your Departure to California.”

“The comfort in the smell of bacon in the morning / is mostly burning fat & salt, but the taste is sweet / as the part of the pig that stores the soul.”

“It makes sense notionally, a painless hypothesis / for our predicament, crayoned face to bridge / the gulf between grace and the lightning storm.”

The author reads his story from the June 30, 2025, issue of the magazine.