They construct spaceports inside our scaffolded jaws Holy spears blast through our skulls with ion thrusters We try to clutch our fleeing ghosts with banded claws We spasm and shit diarrhetic star clusters They huff nozzled volcanoes to their nitrous core They snort lines of crushed hopes off my charred mermaid breasts They rinse their […]

Annie and Daniel lived in a brick house at the end of the street. He was 36 and she was 27. It was their culture for girls to marry boys who were just a little bit older than them. He went to work during the weekday, she made his coffee in the morning then cleaned […]

A few hours before dinner, Dad walked into the restaurant and placed a bomb under the table. He armed it, set the timer and walked out. Our reservation was at six. We met in traffic. I was walking home and Dad was in his rental car, halted at one of the many red lights. The […]

When Jeff Alessandrelli handed me a copy of And Yet, which was reissued by Future Tense Books in April 2024, he noted the book was a work of speculative fiction. I recently described it to someone as Boy Bluets. When Nik Slackman, a digital editor at Fence, read an excerpt, he said: “I love this. […]

Salim, Obaid, Prakash, Usman, and I: five tough boys. We rolled our shirt sleeves up to the shoulders, hurled stones at pigeons, bulbuls, air-conditioner compressors. We were invincible, unpredictable. We saved our greatest mischief for the grocer. It went down this way: we would disperse into the grocery, open the ice cream fridge, then close […]

It was November 1999, 78 degrees, and dust clung to each drop of sweat that seeped from Gloria’s forehead as she forced a shovel into stubborn earth. She felt like Pete’s lackey, digging for the bomb shelter. The site reeked of ammonia–her husband had softened the caliche with buckets of his own piss before taking […]