My mother and grandmother were born in ‘the land of the lake,’ or La Comarca de la Laguna, a cradle of fertile land between the Sierra Madre mountain ranges in the northern Mexican desert

I started asking rivers to feed me as a child—literally, with flesh from fish, then figuratively, with flashes of comfort.

There is a river, lost or hidden, that is impossible to pass six days each week.

I’m writing this much later than I should be, in part, because I’ve just had another birthday, and as I age, I become more reluctant to do more than one job.

The court had decided I was the most logical choice for the bull’s care. I was sufficiently neutral as a production assistant, and I’d already been tasked with managing him at the studio.

Can everyone hear and see me okay? No? Oh, I was on mute, let me just … There we go.

“Why is it that the more transsexual I get, the more employable I feel?”

At the height of the pandemic, I became a new kind of laborer: a student-teacher, a strange, two-faced role.

Savannah Bowen’s La-Pa-La tells the story of two young siblings living in Haiti—one of whom must grapple with the mysterious disappearance of the other. As the surreal begins to eclipse the real, a beautiful unraveling takes hold, leaving readers to wonder whether love may be the only certainty in this or any universe.

Erin Langner is well into adulthood when she is suddenly overcome with nostalgia—and guilt—about her long-since-over childhood obsession with the late R&B icon Aaliyah. In her essay, “The Sound of Absence,” Langner is a reporter and poet both, investigating the psychological phenomena of cultural erasure while also penning a heart-achingly tender ode to the things we love and lose, and the things time begs us to leave behind.

Begin with a name.

The summer before I published my first — and so far, only — book, my husband Alonso and I finally saved enough money and time to spend a week in Paris.

We sit across from each other to play the game Othello.

I said goodbye to my father for the first and last time, after his death, in the quietest place in the United States.

This past November, I was a visitor in a house with many presences: a mouse in the ceiling, ladybug colonies in the doorframe, accumulations and whispers in the hollow of the wall.