1976: This cursed bloodline begat me. Cries at cold air. The beginnings of pain. 1979: Health freak mother teaches me that soda pop and the red cherries on top of…
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In one month, we’ll meet their daughter. For now, we navigate runny duck yolks. “It’s not worth it,” her partner says. “You’re in the final stretch.” Instead we order cheese…
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Jos Charles is a trans poet, translator, editor, and author of feeld, a National Book Award long-listed finalist and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series, selected by Fady Joudah (Milkweed…
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“Wait, you’ve never had a plum?!” My father stares at me, incredulous. It is mid-May, 2015. My father, mother, and I are sitting at our kitchen table, talking over empty…
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Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), recipient of the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and a 2018 Arab American Book Award.…
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FoodHow to satisfy your hunger when you can’t eat anything, or, All I needed to overcome my eating disorder was a grill and a bottle of olive oil (a glibly vast oversimplification)
1. Char grilled eggplant into a new form, its purple skin flaking and twirling around the fork as you try to cut it, the insides almost mush and mostly seeds.…
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Rewind to 2016. Breaking up from my Los Angeles boyfriend. An inch of white at scalp divides long dyed black tresses. I take a vow of celibacy until the gray…
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Nomi Stone is a poet and an anthropologist. Her second collection of poems, Kill Class is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2019. Winner of a 2018 Pushcart Prize, Stone’s poems…
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This is cooking for abandoned hopes. For the path that fails or, rather, fails you. I am not sure what generational identity or identifying can do for us at this…
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The pig, Swine, an animal unfit for consumption by many, deemed unclean. An animal that can be utilized head to tail—as with the fine art of charcuterie. To take a…
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Dean Rader’s debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize and Landscape Portrait Figure Form (2014) was named by The Barnes & Noble…
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I think I was turning 14, when I decided that I would never learn how to cook. Not deliberately at least. As a young girl stubborn in her intentions to…
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Dolly Parton warbles sentimental carols. Triggers Yuletide parental invitation. Grandma is in her grave. Holiday hosting? The torch must be passed. So it is. Christmas Eve, we dine en famille…
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Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve been obsessed with Nutella ever since I first took a bite of the delicious hazelnut spread well over a decade ago. It’s the…