Category: Arts

Writing East

Maybe I’m homesick or maybe I’ve just sold out, but I’ve stopped distinguishing between the states that make up the great green Midwest I call home.

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Mixed Tongues

One sunny Saturday morning, at the end of my first week in Japan, Ms. Shinako arrived, packaged gift in hand, bowing deeply and smiling as she stepped through the door. She was in her mid-twenties, petite and a little bit … Read More

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Recovery

On Allie’s fourteenth birthday, Christopher felt his hard-won sanity begin its retreat—right there at the kitchen table. It started as he watched Allie, his step-daughter, try to tell Cyndi, her mother, stories about their day at Christopher’s parents’ ranch: the … Read More

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I Am Trying To Break Your Heart

1. Lines removed from a play The answer’s in the desk. Oh, yes! This PROBABLY cures cancer. Meta! THE OL’ ONE-TWO! A dog eats a cell phone and it keeps ringing in its stomach. Oh, no! …eats the whole thing. … Read More

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A Yacht Club Party is Winding Down

The last few bars of a big-band tune exposing themselves without a hint of self-awareness and the half-sober apercus of a gaggle of twenty or so be-sequined, be-suited women and men of a certain age their laughter playing soft on … Read More

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Cartoons, Caption Contest, & Art

Some cartoons for your Sunday pleasure.

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The Twenty Years War

Duncan Nussbaum always had a feeling God was out to get him. When he was six years old, he was eating a cheese sandwich – this was back when his parents still kept kosher – and snatched a piece of … Read More

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Emo Rap: A Eulogy

“Lil Peep’s ghostly vocals float drowsily over maximalist emo-trap beats without drowning in them…leaving us with a taste of what might have been: the soaring emotional heights to which rap, the most notoriously heartless genre, almost rose.”

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A Day in the Life of Lil’ Kim

“Got a man in Japan and a dude in Tahiti, Believe me sweety I got enough to feed the needy.” Lil’ Kim, “The Jump Off” I do have a man in Japan and a dude in Tahiti. The Tahitian natives … Read More

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I like you best when your lines are blurry

I like you best when your lines are blurry,
and your words melt from mouth to air

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Another Way of Missing You

In the French, tu me manques – you are missing to me. You are missing to me, to my body, to my arms which starve on air, to my eyes which dream up the shape of you in everything. You … Read More

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Borrowed Words: Learning to Write by Rote

At 12:59 on a Monday, professor Craig Dworkin stood at the front of the class in his graying black sweatshirt, coffee cup in hand and said, “Okay, so right now we’re going to experiment with Breton’s automatic writing. If you get stuck, just think of the letter L and words that start with L.”

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