Articles

We are baking a cake and nothing is wrong I do not have a pit in my stomach Lina comes in licks chocolate icing off the side of your hand I am unfazed in fact, the evening is still entirely ours you’re wearing your dead mother’s checkered apron, and we talk until our words drift …

ugly as the day I was born I carry my girlhood like an apology scraping dead selves off the soles of my feet onto the pavement onto the organic produce at Whole Foods onto my lover’s best pillowcases a sorry sight elsewhere a perfect specimen soft spoken unstained underwear graceful even in death my god …

Where is home? At the corner of Union St. and Clinton Ave., where a cream colonial house sits on an acre of lush grass. Where, amidst aged black oaks and red maples, a nascent Japanese cherry tree buds along the yard’s back edge. Planted by my father in honor of my birth, our timelines expand …

H E ain’t coming back tonight. Next night neither. You hear your marrow cresting its cricks & miss what you never thought you’d miss: him snoring through midnight, uvula clocking its knocker on his throat’s narrow door. The hogs housed in his hothouse mouth—whose truffle they rootin’ now? You collage women in your sleep: knees …

“Void,” neon, wood, paint, 10’x7’x3’, 2022. Photo credit: Mollie McKinley Void distorts a viewer’s perception of space by creating the illusion that the hole in the wall is a 2D object.  Neon light is cast onto a concave form inside the void, creating a smooth, unchanging surface where our eyes cannot see depth, creating the …

Last year Timothy and I went to Art Basel Miami. I insisted, actually, Timothy knowing less than nothing about art and my obsession with painting. In the hotness of Florida, the sun melted my makeup, leaving striped marks down my cheeks, and caused Timothy’s bald head to glisten like a marble dropped in oil. We …

The process had seemed slow at first. This was before it was a process, before the couple had decided this was something to document, to worry over. One morning, Jon’s husband simply woke up shorter. They stood together at the bathroom sink, staring into the mirror at each other, as they had done for many …

Winner of the 2022 “Tobias Wolff Award” in Fiction Years later, the village headman would sigh, “A place without a smile is a pajama without a drawstring – the minute you stand up and walk away, it collapses around your ankles.” Our drawstring stretches many miles from the bustling city of Calcutta to the tiny, …

A full-throated rustling at each long window. Landline with static. My partner tells me that our connection makes me sound faint or fuzzy and often doesn’t answer the phone when I try. I could be engulfed by the forest, slowly overtaken by unnamed insects I hear but not see, who I don’t know the names …

Emdash 高璐璐 is a neurodivergent poet, writer, educator, host and daughter of Chinese immigrants. Her poems are published in sine theta, poetry.onl, Kissing Dynamite, The Good Life Review and Queer Rain. Her prose lives in Mochi Magazine, Mashable, The Rumpus, Split Magazine and YLWRNGR. She has performed at The San Diego Art Institute, Historic Filipinotown LA …