Reading Room Archives - Page 48 of 111

This Kind of Fairytale

Dec 7, 2013 | Poetry, Reading Room

We polish our big bellies with creams, we henna Eden vines on them, we Buddha rub them, as do strangers, for wealth. In birth class they tell us your body was made for this. They tell us your mothers were strapped down and drugged. We are capable of doing so...

Saturday Family Picnics

Sep 7, 2013 | Creative Non-Fiction, Reading Room

I learned how to pick locks in prison. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon; the adults were drunk and some had paired off to have sex in tents pitched on the lawn. I was sitting on the scratched wooden pew of a picnic table, playing backgammon by myself. I shuffled the...

Cloak

Sep 7, 2013 | Poetry, Reading Room

I hide my power in a cloak I hoard as anger. My jaw gears like a charging bull; hairs horn from my butting forehead. “sky. There is no edge from which to hang my plumb-line. No ledge on which to lay my spirit-level. And you are outside piling logs, working on your own...

Snatch and Release

Sep 7, 2013 | Fiction, Reading Room

Manolo called it the Everybody Laughs Scam, but as I approached the couple on the bench I found that prospect hard to imagine. The woman looked teary-eyed and the man had the strap of his camera bag wrapped three times around his fist. Manolo called it the Everybody...

Yellow

Jul 14, 2013 | Poetry, Reading Room

Room would like to apologize to Yoko's Dogs for the formatting errors made in "Yellow" in issue 36.2. Room would like to apologize to Yoko's Dogs for the formatting errors made in "Yellow" in issue 36.2. Yellow I her cardinals return from the west printed on napkins...

The Gathering

Jun 7, 2013 | Poetry, Reading Room

The wind rolls down the street a rogue wave and breaks in the maples above. Great swells crest in the uppermost branches and it is alone a wonder how the little birds are not shaken loose from their limbs. The wind rolls down the street a rogue wave and breaks in the...

Town

Jun 7, 2013 | Poetry, Reading Room

It starts with a river. Green hills, and promising flatland beneath them. All these trees go, and get lugged out of the clearing. The stone near the water is brought to the place where the woods once stood, and also the felled trees that lived there before, and this...

Rag Quilt

Jun 7, 2013 | Creative Non-Fiction, Reading Room

I ate my first raw peanut a few months before we left for Sudan. I was taken aback by its beany-ness. It is a bean, not a nut. I had known that, been told, “It’s a part of the legume family.” But in my mouth for that first time, it was transformed. Peanut. Pea-bean....

The Day India’s First Woman Prime Minister Was Assassinated

Mar 7, 2013 | Poetry, Reading Room

Sister Nora shaved Amritjit and Balwinder’s hair— “export the dictator from the province next door the twentieth century could be home” —Kimberly Alidio, Songs of Americas Sister Nora shaved Amritjit and Balwinder’s hair— walked them home herself by noon, school was...

My Brother’s Body

Jan 7, 2013 | Poetry, Reading Room

My brother lost his body bit by bit—a foot, a finger, a shin. The doctors strapped it to a bed, and the mouth screamed on its behalf: Help! Help! With the eyes, my brother spied me, standing in the body of someone who looked like his sister; and the mouth said Health!...