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Arriving By Maritza Arrastia This is an excerpt from the beginning of the novel in progress Todos. It takes place in a fictional Caribbean island, half socialist and half a colony, that sits in the sea in relation to the metropolis, called the City, like Cuba sits in relation to key West. The collapse of capitalism is just a few degrees more acute than it is now. For two centuries Karaya, the colony, has been fighting a liberation war against the City. Socialist Ventura has been defending its revolution from unrelenting imperial attack for fifty years. The island is straddled by an imperial base, half of it in the colony and half of it in the socialist country. Many rebels have been disappeared there and a permanent demonstration has arisen beside it, where my protagonists have just arrived, a pod of two women in their sixties, one with her son who is 17, and one with a six year old granddaughter, looking for Desaparecido loved ones who may have been disappeared in the base. The driver dumped our duffels on the gravel and took off. Before we left the City my son Machi made the rule, one...

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A Common Amnesia

Apogee Journal

01 Jul 2015

A Common Amnesia By Alex Cuff Originally published in Apogee Issue 4 But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind. –Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851 white butcher paper wrapping the white bagel with the white sesame seeds inside white wax paper white spray paint tagging the framing store on metropolitan before 1691 the word white did not exist white letters of Brooklyn Seoul six white people in the bagel store white napkins the white Nissan sedan parked across the street left over dirty white snow before 1691 the word white did not exist in a legal document the white help wanted sign in the bagel store window me a white girl sitting under the bright white light bulb that many things I do or do not do think or do not think say or do not say...

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One of His Advantages

Apogee Journal

01 Jul 2015

One of His Advantages By T.K. Dalton Excerpted from original publication on The Millions Count weather among the forces that I move through life without understanding. What is its origin? What shapes its future? Parenting is humbling, and I end most days shuffling unwieldy questions like this, rarely dealing out anything like an answer. One frigid Saturday, wind and sleet scratched my plans to grocery-shop with my 16-month-old. He and I detoured, to our nearby library. More than basmati rice or cauliflower, in that moment he needed open space, the familiar thick carpet where he could squat and squeal freely. He needed the warm light of enormous lampshades embossed with ants, birds, and humpback whales. He needed more books. Actually, for different reasons, we both did. My son hadn’t tired of Good Dog, Carl or My Friends. He’d started requesting Tickle, Tickle by name. His mother invoked Knuffle Bunny while he handed her laundry, and Brush Your Teeth, Please had helped me transform a grim chore into something like dessert. (Grape-flavored toothpaste deserves some credit here). For weeks, maybe months, books had reliably engaged him, exciting or calming him depending on the title, the time of day, and...