Author’s note: I wrote this story because I yearn for the days that the wind has swept away. In the neighborhood of fishermen where I was born, we kids didn’t have a bathroom. Only adults had…
Creative Nonfiction
Photo courtesy of Ksenia Emelianchik / UnsplashFranco’s legacy falls across a celebration of two friends’ birthdays but fails to stifle the hard-earned, uncontainable, savored joy. Up four flights of…
Photos by Daniel Lincoln and Debby Hudson / UnsplashThe Georgian Sketchbook is both a poet’s diary and a chronicle of a Russian war exile in Georgia. Irina Lewinsky, an executive member of the Saint P…
Looking for relief and new possibilities, a lecturer at the University of Ibadan travels to Cape Town, but the route is anything but direct. By 1999 the massive exodus out of Nigeria had attained a cr…
Earlier today, as our car was on queue along the Saudi–Bahrain causeway, he turned down the stereo volume for a moment. “What will happen to this Filipini?” The Mary Jane Veloso trial was broadcasted…
Cairo Al-Rifa'i Mosque | Photo by Mohammed Moussa | CC BY-SA 3.0 An Iranian woman living in the US seeks to understand the meaning of home on a journey to Egypt to visit the burial place of Moham…
Interior of Arbatskaya subway station in Moscow, Russia A woman sweeping the Moscow metro with a twig broom, a violinist playing a Beatles tune, and Chekhov: Philip Metres reflects on his time on…
Translator’s note: The following text by Lin Yi-Han, like her novel Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise, is based on the theme of what it’s like to dwell in a body that carries traum…
What Is Lost Can you picture the Argentine pampa? Flat fields, eucalyptus trees, a seemingly inoffensive landscape where a gray sunset might use your boiling blood to paint a path st…
Transfer of Saint Remi relics, stained glass window in the Basilica of Saint Clotilde in Paris, France Named after a medieval French bishop, a transgender poet and essayist reflects on the inheri…
Photo courtesy of the author. for Juan José Hurtado, in memoriam For the narrator of the following crónica, 16mm films made by Kaqchikel villagers, flying ants, and dragonflies all flick…
Gloria Blizzard and Jazz, Lake Ontario, Canada | Photo by Heidi Seirekidis This essay takes the form of a jazz standard. Nestled within the intro and outro are alternating A and B sections. I am…
Photo by by Elena Croitoru A countryside flâneuse in search of her deceased grandfather contemplates anchoring, wandering, and the small marks we leave on the world. How does one get to know…
Girma Berta, Asmara XII (2018), digital archival print, 45 x 60 cm / Courtesy of Addis Fine Art Oscillating between Asmara, Eritrea, and Washington, DC, the narrator reflects on the powe…
Photo provided by Nina Kossman A family’s history, Soviet history, and the role of a father’s stamp collection. Do you see this little metal box? It was surely unusual for its time—just look…
“Demeter and Persephone Terracotta Myrina 100 BCE” by mharrsch is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 A car racing down an empty steppe highway frames this essay from Kazakhstan today, as a mother pon…
M. Florine Démosthène, Wounds #1, collage on paper, 22 x 30 in. / Courtesy of the artist There was once a beautiful little bear called Baby Bear. One day, Baby Bear went for a walk in th…
M. Florine Démosthène, But I Have To, collage on paper, 44 x 60 in. / Courtesy of the artist A djeli (commonly known as a griot) is a West African storyteller who is the keeper of oral t…
Illustration by Maya Ish-Shalom Chickens, from Bessarabia to New York City, provide a generational through-line in these four vignettes. Popol Twenty-three years after my…
Illustration by Avery Holmes “Bakery Scent is a complex that cannot be dismantled or piecemealed,” yet the author still searches for that perfect madeleine, especially the one that can no longer…
Photo by Krisztian Matyas / Unsplash “Awl” is from a series titled “Words I Did Not Understand.” Through memory—“the first screen of nostalgia”—and language, a writer pieces together her story of…
Armando Diaz / Flickr In that swirl of ideas, stuck in the middle of that overpopulation of bodies, I lose my cardboard piece. That is a sign too, another type of sign, a message from the gods of…
Photo: Havana, Cuba by Tiago Claro / Unsplash In this work of creative nonfiction from Cuba, plague is something common shared with those who lived in Thebes. I carefully open a pregnancy te…
