ISSUE 133

181 Pages

In This Issue:

Nonfiction

“Tomb Sweeping” by Leilani Clark: “I’d only known the place through my grand­ma’s telling. The house, the neighborhood didn’t feel like a place that I could visit and see with my own eyes—the hills where she smoked Sensations and the sidewalks she took with her sisters to the stores on Whittier Boulevard. This, even though I’d begun my life there, the only grandchild to be born in East Los Ange­les, almost two decades after the houses had been bulldozed.”

Fiction 

“Promotion Cycles” by Allie Coon: “I thought they were starting to get it, then. I saw them put­ting themselves into my shoes. Perhaps I wouldn’t notice either, they realized, if my husband was operating the largest refund shipping fraud scheme in international history. Not in the throes of a love so deep, so transformative, so true.”

“Soft Power” by Reo Eveleth: Just about everybody has a power. Some impressive, some not. Potential is here to help their clients discover theirs.

“Sofia in Her Tower” by Cristina Friés: A struggling fruit vendor cannot let go of his obsession with the young woman who appears above the street from her apartment building.

“Slow Wheels” by Bryan Washington: “Ange sits up. My purpose, in most ways, is simple: I’m looking after her son while she normalizes her post-divorce situation. Ange wasn’t her family’s chef, so that’s what I do. And she didn’t carry Hugh across the city, so I do that, too. …
“So I am, essentially, her brother and her husband.”

Poetry

Jia-Rui Cook, ethan s. evans, hector son of hector, Erick Mihaly, and Jesse Nathan.

In Conversation

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tessa Hulls talks to Sonora Jha about Jha’s work, her “anarchic questioning of gender and history,” and her latest novel, the “tenderly subversive” Intemperance.

Art

Helen Shewolfe Tseng