Like Us For a Whiter You Mai Nardone   We’re waiting to get into Metropole when a native thirty-something in a miniskirt takes Bird’s hand and tells him in English, “Mister, my friend, you want sexy massage, Mister?” Stella and I stamp our heels and laugh. It’s funny because this woman’s so floorcountry Thai […]

  After the Prolonged Tide in the Dusk Chia-Lun Chang after The Great Retreat   you come alone with showers, always trek in December with chilblains, and are granted giant maggots. I say, go away, I never belong to you, bear my fingers, my foot, and leave the cell open  in a tiny and moist […]

  Ghostfathered K-Ming Chang   In the beginning of his dying, Agong rode the bus up and down the coast of California with no money and no English and no pants. A woman at a bus stop called to tell us there was a man straddling the bench like a pony, alternatively simulating hoof-noises with […]

  far away from home I am hungry Urvi Kumbhat After Jane Wong   We wake to find   our lives   have been quartered We hold at bay the knife just a little longer Such tedious operations in repair      We begin to stitch           Downstairs my mother slices a guava       How do […]

  Letter from the Editor   Reader, Dig, if you will, the picture: catastrophe, suffering, and a spotlight on society’s inequities—rounded, diffuse illumination darting the landscape, as if life were a film, and this, a scene of escape. Editorials, think pieces, talking heads: they’re trying, with breadth and urgency, to tell us that shit is […]

Zora J. Murff, Cross.