In the Texas prison system, my name is Chino. You will not know who I am unless you are immediate family or one of my few friends.
Two women write about imprisonment, one from the outside and one from the inside.
“The very moment I thought I was lost / My dungeon shook and the chains fell off.”
It’s not the bullet that makes you bolt, / but the very words /
emerging from the muzzle’s restraint / the classroom in disguise
Is every english word I pull from my mouth a child screaming / over the soft chants of ma and nanni ma?
A peek into the life of NYC’s Iranian Americans amid recent tensions
When the children / correctly used their chopsticks to pick up the rolled eggs and / separated the kimchi without splinters, they knew they were / loved by their food. The ashes knew it too.
& if the speaker does not know that this language is faulty, then the speaker has been secretly muzzled
What I want / is to be unspooled from my navel until / not even my body can keep me. Wildened to morsels / of mortal sound, I crave only the crown of being unseen.
‘I was pushing myself to write from places that terrified me.’
The green fruit would collect on the ground before we threw them to be devoured with the fervor we reserved for galas and granny smiths.
Imagine the tens of millions of years that American prisons have stolen, woven back into society.
Question: with sharp enough clippers, can you help / any tree grow small? With sharp enough clippers, can you outlive your / kids?
How does violence blossom // What’s known must be made unknown
a land mistaken for a people is a people / objectified as spoils of the land
I forced myself to tell her to accept it and think of it as entering into a new theater. Turn it into raw material and endure to write about it.
/ Pərˈ(h)aps / preceding us, one ballad to each tongue,
oh, / ‘absəˌlōō(y)tlē /, we refrained from singing
The author of trans(re)lating house one talks translation, mapping Tehran, and writing through the aftermath of Iran’s 2009 election.
Mom and I would share toast, shedding crumbs all over the bed while I asked her other questions, like if it was possible to move things with your eyes, what the word “fuck” meant, if angels existed or if she could tell me the story about when she and Dad got me from Nanchang.
What tense do we belong in? I prolong a period / into a comma. I want to revive we’s we’ve archived. / I would let Time drown like a sparrow in a lake
There’s no shame in loving durian at this New York City haven.
Two women write about imprisonment, one from the outside and one from the inside.
Imagine the tens of millions of years that American prisons have stolen, woven back into society.
“The very moment I thought I was lost / My dungeon shook and the chains fell off.”
Question: with sharp enough clippers, can you help / any tree grow small? With sharp enough clippers, can you outlive your / kids?
It’s not the bullet that makes you bolt, / but the very words /
emerging from the muzzle’s restraint / the classroom in disguise
How does violence blossom // What’s known must be made unknown
Is every english word I pull from my mouth a child screaming / over the soft chants of ma and nanni ma?
a land mistaken for a people is a people / objectified as spoils of the land
A peek into the life of NYC’s Iranian Americans amid recent tensions
I forced myself to tell her to accept it and think of it as entering into a new theater. Turn it into raw material and endure to write about it.
When the children / correctly used their chopsticks to pick up the rolled eggs and / separated the kimchi without splinters, they knew they were / loved by their food. The ashes knew it too.
/ Pərˈ(h)aps / preceding us, one ballad to each tongue,
oh, / ‘absəˌlōō(y)tlē /, we refrained from singing
& if the speaker does not know that this language is faulty, then the speaker has been secretly muzzled
The author of trans(re)lating house one talks translation, mapping Tehran, and writing through the aftermath of Iran’s 2009 election.
What I want / is to be unspooled from my navel until / not even my body can keep me. Wildened to morsels / of mortal sound, I crave only the crown of being unseen.
Mom and I would share toast, shedding crumbs all over the bed while I asked her other questions, like if it was possible to move things with your eyes, what the word “fuck” meant, if angels existed or if she could tell me the story about when she and Dad got me from Nanchang.
‘I was pushing myself to write from places that terrified me.’
What tense do we belong in? I prolong a period / into a comma. I want to revive we’s we’ve archived. / I would let Time drown like a sparrow in a lake
The green fruit would collect on the ground before we threw them to be devoured with the fervor we reserved for galas and granny smiths.
There’s no shame in loving durian at this New York City haven.