Strands of hay whirl away from the truck, wafting out, down, and over all things, lifted by the breeze from the rocking motion of the truck on the uneven road, wafting down to lay a golden carpet on the concrete, strand by strand rolling past beneath my wheels, the late fall light slanting through the cloud still in the air. I am encased in a world of gold dust and threads, thinking of all those who’d urge me pull out, speed up, and hurry past the steady truck driver …
We couldn’t find the labyrinth, which was maddening because I’d been there before and was convinced we were in the right place. Much of what I’d remembered seemed to have been drained or extracted from the scene. There was no more outrageous, biblical sea foam that had once claimed so much of the beach. The dozens of painstakingly stacked cairns previous wanderers had constructed for those after them had been disassembled or washed away. Most disconcerting was the total disappearance of the …
It was the pants that caught my eye on the way to meet an old friend. Suspended in the boutique window, the fine wool drape's exquisite softness was meant to draw the attention of a certain type of man. I knew a man of this sort, though I hadn’t thought of him since college. I saw him there, a ghost through the window, his pale hands. How carefully he’d drape the pants over the back of the chair. How much he valued these things, his clothes, from the attention, the honor, really, that he paid …
I swirled a bottle of guava kombucha touched my ear to the mouth to hear it sing to hear the bubbles tinkle and poke like a million grains of jasmine rice being emptied into a jar, mingled with the sea shells and salt from my tearful breaths bursting from behind brittle ribs hell-bound, burdened from breaking hearts and stereotypes about beautiful women —because Mama says it is good to be brave. Eliana Chow is an American-born Chinese writer and editor from Pennsylvania, currently living …
I heard Sistah gifted Woama a size XXL tee, graphic anime printed like a schoolgirl’s, and a bunch of undergarments, white as chalk and milk, ones she bought at a Clearance Sale, unboxed them, unrolled them with care, and when she spread them on the floor with an unmistakable flourish, because she’d brought them all the way from New Jersey, Woama pushed an inky-blue melamine tray with deep fried fritters towards Sistah’s husband to please him, extract a grin, and started pouring chubitchi into a …
I’ve drawn curtains over the moon, hatched over stars, fanned out your antlers. You look like a coat rack. Maybe I should have drawn an octopus. So I’m drawing an octopus. Oy, my octopus looks like a parachute. Let’s call it a jellyfish. The barbed stingers on its tentacles are poisonous. I’m adding a second jellyfish to double the dosage. I see lightning between the four of us. It’s what I was going for. This is our play, my reindeer. I’ll join you onstage. We’ll tangle their tentacles. …