TLR

AUTOBIOGRAPHY ||| Dunes Review

      My mother’s eyes—a green sometimes blue, or gray—     my father studied them the way he studied light              with his camera lens constantly, there was a sadness, Slavic and cloud-like. My … Continued

Totem

      Hatched from the wet egg of a sculptor’s eye a quarter century ago, it grips its squat stump, wings outstretched as if to dry. Its bones are wires, its plumage ragged strips of pages torn from my … Continued

So Wild

            Pearl was limp with boredom and Taiwan’s humidity. That morning Pearl’s mother, Wen Hua, told her that visitors were coming to the house and ordered her to wear one of the playsuits she’d bought … Continued

Suspensions

Translated from French by S.C. Delaney and Agnès Potier   First it was two false incisors falling on his plate. In the past he might have laughed, written some pages, maybe a decent story he’d have put away with some … Continued

Snapshot

The Husband & I stand next to each other: not speaking, sometimes speaking. See? Asks the photograph. A closeness or almostness? The photograph is meaningless except insofar as it is a record of us in a place at a moment … Continued

Honeymoon

    1. Is This Canada? There are aliens living on top of Toronto’s CN Tower. They are attempting to send you a message. They want to spy on earthlings before they make their final invasion and start a full-out … Continued

No. 1964

    Translated by Robert Hedin and Dag T. Straumsvåg I’m prisoner 1964, my birth year. My cell number is the same as my phone number. I often sit in front of my cell door looking for cracks in the … Continued

No Aerial Experience Required

    Everything she owned fit into a yellow cab. A year living on Avenue B and all she’d accumulated were calluses from barefoot turns, the bottom of each toe hardened and ridged like the edge of an almond. It … Continued

Sex Machina

    Against a xeroxed purity I’m learning to say My pleasure Pouring one out For narrative unity Watching soap operas On a stained futon I’m learning about free will How little I have Nature produces automata Opening an email … Continued

Debt Free

    I knew someone Who went broke throwing clam bakes A generous backfire There are wet dreams It aches to wake from Like unlearning the axiom that To love anyone You have to love everyone Watching my love rescue … Continued

Object Permanence

    Making out inside a Richard Serra Strikes me as the right way to take in art Like embracing an echo The moment examined mercurifies An eviscerated longing I feel like a voyeur Eating warm cheese at the gallery … Continued

In a Land Strange to Us

translated from Italian by Allison Grimaldi-Donahue     3 March 2002 We saw each other in a land that was strange to you, the first time: me on the other side of that metal detector, hoping you would make it … Continued

Physics: All Fiction Issue

For over a year now I’ve been making my way through Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days, a collection of 248 prose fragments spanning two decades’ worth of “loafing, looking, hobbling, sitting, traveling . . .” around the country, in the woods … Continued

Final Cutoff Notice

When my father broke parole and went back to prison, my face widened with red pimples of hearsay. For hours, I leaned on the refrigerator door, tasting rotten food. I slipped in the woods, stropped a buck knife, let go. … Continued

Café Sarajevo

In the Balkans, nothing vanishes completely. In my hometown, people give directions like this: You go two blocks past the oil refinery, and then one block up, past the military barracks, and then turn left. . . . The oil … Continued

The Prescription

In our field is a bull. It is just the head—the horns sticking out from the snow. The bull died suddenly and the owners wanted to know why and so my husband sent the lab a tissue sample. In the … Continued

The Junk Drawer

1. It was one of the only places in their house where logic and order did not prevail. He had dreams about it sometimes; in one, the drawer appeared in the guise of a giant shipboard valve that, when opened, … Continued

The Human Variable

This part of Northern California was too dark, Ted felt. It freaked him out. Without a moon, the lack of streetlights gave everything a creepy redneck vibe. Driving with his high beams on reminded him of certain back roads in … Continued

The Fight and the Flight Issues

I was wildly intrigued when first introduced to the concept of the fight-or-flight stress response. I ran it over furiously in my mind, calculating out “the way I was” and “what it all meant about me,” as if it were … Continued

The Tides

  When I think of Virginia Woolf, the picture that springs to mind is a woman in a large dress, wading slowly into a river, her pockets laden with stones so that she will be sure never to surface again. … Continued

Invisible Cities

  It feels to me as if I’ve always known Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. As if my brain were born and instantly had Invisible Cities in its matter to refer to. But that wasn’t the order of things. Pippi Longstocking came first and … Continued

Refrigerator Mothers

  I met our cover artist, Israeli photographer Elinor Carucci, about fifteen years ago. I’d been assigned to interview her about her debut series, Closer, by the then new arty high-concept online sex magazine, Nerve.com. Elinor’s pictures weren’t sexy—exactly. There … Continued