After Lucia Berlin In my story, the mother and daughter go out for dim sum on a Sunday, or a Saturday maybe, after basketball. My first draft was from the mom’s point of view, but then she got…
SLOAN ASAKURA (she/he/they) is a poet and memoirist from Los Angeles. They are a 2022 Periplus Fellow, a 2023 Tin House Resident, an upcoming 2025 Tin House Workshop participant, and a 2026 candidate for an MFA in literary arts at…
Content Warning: This piece of creative nonfiction includes the use of a slur and its use reclaimed, as well as a brief scene involving the threat of violence. Act I My mother always said, borrowing from Lois McMaster…
“Mijo. Venga. Ayúdeme.” I rouse myself out of bed at two in the morning. “Mijo, lléveme a El Salto,” he tells me as I enter his bedroom. I sit by his bed, reach over the railing, release his grip.…
Pac got shot up in ’96, this time on a famous strip in Las Vegas. In three days he’d rise again like Jesus, a Lazarus in the Bible, outside of his hometown claiming victory over Hades. He’d be back…
Somehow, here—before the picnic ramadas and megaplayground and volley and basketball courts near a man-made lake with knolls bristled with grass—stood, for ninety-nine years, a residential boarding school named Phoenix Indian School. But no more. This acreage is now…
Spring 2025 When did Black women get so impatient with our own selves? Is what I think alongside sitting underneath a hooded hair dryer for thirty minutes, the plastic cap bubbling a brewing smell of onion juice, garlic, and…
My mother’s been dead since 1982, two thirds of my life. Today, I am perched on a stool at a table in the Comics Room at the University of Wisconsin–Madison trying to remember what she looked like so I…
Elvis Presley’s warbling on the overhead speakers as Mom and I browse a warm, wood-splashed Barnes & Noble. She wants to buy a puzzle for my nephew in Florida. She turns to me. “Oh god, the day Elvis died?…
I. Rain gush-pummels our car. Whippet wipers slash frantically at the whitecaps. Off to Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, to watch our daughter, Lily’s, volleyball tournament. It’s the weekend before Thanksgiving, and our son, Hudson, is meeting us there from Pittsburgh. …