Issue 5

The rain poured, with no evident intention of stopping. Nearby, a mother with two little boys, who were wearing bright-colored rain boots, tugged at her sons’ coats to stop them from splashing around in the puddles. On the other side of the sidewalk, an elderly couple walked hand in hand under a sizable opaque umbrella. […]

It would take her signal one-and-a-half milliseconds to reach Mission Control in Houston, which was a short time, by all means. After all, not a thing can travel faster than electromagnetic waves; it would take the flight controller’s brain thirteen milliseconds to even process what he was reading when her signal arrived. Likewise, it would […]

“We are the ones who had no comforting amnesia of childhood, and for whom the trauma of passing from the country to the city of destruction brought no anesthesia of unconsciousness, but left our nerves peeled and quivering . . . ”— Ralph Ellison (Rampersad 164)

Introduction

My forthcoming book uses the experience of my […]

Watching him unravel the knotted yarn, Yuri sat next to her grandson Joshua. She grabbed her needles from their perch in a weave of wool on the patio table. She couldn’t help but think how Frank, Jr., her CEO of a son, would react to Joshua’s secret hobby.

Yuri dismissed the thought and focused instead […]

I was seven when I realized there was something different about my mom. The other mothers talked to each other after school, picked their kids up early. My mom screeched into the parking lot at a different time every day and yelled at us to get in the car. But that wasn’t it. The other […]

They called Tita Maritess the bus lady because she gave bus passes to all the Filipino commuters and I guess, within the span of three days, I was one of them too now, memorizing my daily morning and evening route. I would repeat it over and over, the 125 to the 460 to the purple […]

We were the last house on Taitano Street, where lost things found their rest. The road was hugged by houses on one side and boonies on the other, ending on a rocky platform of shrubs that dropped into a cliff. Stray dogs would often emerge from the boonies and meet in our driveway, pawing and […]

Consider, for a moment, the suburban lawn. Like a banker’s watch or a lawyer’s car, the lawn is a homeowner’s bling. Amongst the endless tracts of modest homes, crisscrossed by wide roads and dimpled with mini-malls, surrounded by miles of hot, black parking lots, each lawn must be perfect: no yellow patches, no weeds, and […]

They flock to the park cloaked in black,
perched on benches in the Winter sun,
the bills of their ball caps, like beaks,
dipping in and out. Like the grackles
surrounding bread crumbs,
the ancient Armenians
ease their emotional baggage—too young
to remember but old enough to recall […]

THE BABY ON BAXTER

On Baxter Street, a hill so steep that drivers stop
at the summit, abandon their cars, and study
the road, a hiker pauses to catch his breath.
His dog running on ahead, noses a crumpled box
nestled in wild sage and blue plumbago.

The man tugs at […]

L.A. is the new New Orleans: a spicy melange of cultures that improves life for all.

When my family, along with many other New Orleans expatriates, moved to Los Angeles in the boom years following World War II, we were exotics, bringing something new to this city and its great racial divides. Our Creole genes […]