Familiar Strangers by Sena Moon

CH1 Grandpa Choi once sat me down and said, you’ve got a face that begs to study. “Jang Mi-in, you’ve got a face that needs education.” Needs. There wasn’t wiggle room in his vernacular. I knew what he…
CH1 Grandpa Choi once sat me down and said, you’ve got a face that begs to study. “Jang Mi-in, you’ve got a face that needs education.” Needs. There wasn’t wiggle room in his vernacular. I knew what he…
Everyone is coughing behind a mask. The papers warn that the only way to avoid the sweeping sickness is to limit contact, but kids are still playing together in the streets because October in Cloquet, Minnesota is rarely this…
Ugly, ain’t it? The whole fuck of it. The way the doctor’s fingers patted the rim of skin on Mummy’s concave chest. The twin rims where she, Doctor Small Tits, had cut off Mummy’s two breasts, golden brown to…
The plane lands in the one hour of tilted midday light that January sees daily. I step down onto the icy runway, and my new principal throws my bag into the bed of a red pickup. I climb in…
In May 1939, Adolf Hitler received a request from the parents of Gerhard Kretschmar, who was born blind and missing limbs. The Kretschmars wanted to kill their child. Hitler authorized his personal physician, SS officer Dr. Karl Brandt, to…
Essay by Sam Risak • “Florida man arrested for calling 911 after kitten denied entry into strip club.” “Florida man once arrested for fighting drag queen with tiki torch runs for mayor.” “Florida man killed by alligator while hiding…
The day you killed your mother, you wished your father dead. A whole life of could-bes glittered in your mind. A beauty parlour for your mother, reams of thread and pots of sticky wax. A lunchbox business, stacks of…
On the Big Island of Hawai‘i, Honokaa is the town tourists drive through to get to Waipi‘o Valley. At the top of the valley is a scenic overlook, which provides an unobstructed view to the black sand beach, river,…
By Mark David Kaufman • James Joyce once observed that he had included so many “enigmas and puzzles” in Ulysses that professors would be preoccupied with the book “for centuries”—an effective way, he added, of “insuring one’s immortality.” Such…
Inspired by Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino—a story of my life Perhaps the farmland becomes industrial yards with barbed wire fences, and then the barbed wire fences become concrete retaining walls covered in graffiti, and you are there.…
In lieu of an author’s note, we’ve gathered some of Hart L’Ecuyer’s thoughts on this piece and its inspiration. —CRAFT
In an entry on his blog in 2019, Hart L’Ecuyer announced that he’d been inspired by a MasterClass seminar with Billy Collins to write poetry about his own life for a change—instead of the “feudal Japanese lords and dead presidents and mid-century Russian socialites” that had occupied him most recently. “Y’all damn well better like this stuff when it’s done,” he wrote, “because it sure is tough to look in the mirror and not run away sometimes.”
In his flash creative nonfiction piece “Cities and Desire,” L’Ecuyer marries the tough realism of looking in the mirror with the surrealism of so much of his poetry. He credits the Italian surrealist Italo Calvino as the model for his essay, which is epigraphed: “inspired by Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino—a story of my life.” “This small nonfiction piece is presented in the style of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities,” he shared with us. “It tells of a return home from a brief vacation—and a heroin relapse. In a way it tells the story of multiple such relapses, many of which took a similar shape. I was a heroin addict for about two years before doctors found a sinus tumor between my right eye and my brain. I finally stopped, but the damage was done. In my nonfiction I explore that time in my life as part of the healing process.”
A proud St. Louis native and committed surrealist, HART L’ECUYER has attended Loyola University Chicago, St. Louis University, Webster University, New York University, and the University of Missouri—St. Louis. He has published poems in over two dozen literary magazines, including PARAGRAPHITI, Blue Lyra Review, Futures Trading, Blue River Review, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Former People, Bad Jacket, The Conglomerate, Blue Moon, Mannequin Haus, and Subterranean Blue Poetry. He has performed all over St. Louis, as well as at bookstores and bars in Chicago, Kansas City, New York, Berlin, and Paris. His eighth poetry collection, Broadcast Domino Plague, was recently published by Spartan Press.