Prose
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Corzo
One day when I was in the seventh grade, I came home to my father—Eduvigo Herrera III—cutting his heart out with a steak knife. He was sitting at the little kitchen table when I got home from school, his hand in a ragged chest wound the size of a plum. "Mija, I need you to …
Lion
When the old man died, I laid him out in the bathtub because he was small and neatly fit. I took him by the ankles first and then, moving slowly toward his neck, gently scrubbed him down. I lifted him at the back and washed his ribs all the way around until he was like …
Miss Saigon
My mother was Miss Saigon of 1973, two years before the fall and capture of the city by the People’s Army of Vietnam and the Viêt Công. There is a solid silver trophy, its height the length of my torso. The cup itself is the circumference of a basketball, and its S-shaped handles are molded …
Emergency Brake by Ruth Madievsky, Tavern Books, 2016.
Lungs, throats, doors: these images recur throughout Emergency Brake, the debut collection from poet Ruth Madievsky. Each names a portal, an opening where smoke or speech or someone may pass between inside and outside. "I think the body is a door," muses one poem’s speaker. Emergency Brake makes brilliant use of this insight, that to …
Clean
Margo wanted to shower on a train. She pictured it thusly: a compact stall, neat, clean, maybe a seat in the corner. Her face upturned, eyes closed, and hot water streaming from a surprisingly strong showerhead, the train rocking gently beneath her, the water rolling rapidly over her. Around her, life on the train, families …
Working Girl
I want to be a model or a writer. I am neither of these things. What I am is fifteen and five foot eight, with collarbones deep enough to drink my black coffee out of, a head full of dreams, and a job with Western Australia’s largest and only Sunday newspaper. The job is my …
Federer as Irreligious Experience
In 2006 David Foster Wallace opened his much celebrated New York Times Magazine essay “Federer as Religious Experience” with “Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when …
A Body of Athletics: An Introduction to the Possibilities of Sport
Before every basketball game, from rec league to high school, my mother told me, Knock ‘em dead. She never said, Good luck. * When Prairie Schooner asked me to solicit twenty to forty pages of writing for a “sports themed” issue, I was in a castle in Umbria, Italy, reading Pedro Salinas, writing poems and …