Robin Tung
Coyote

Robin Tung - Coyote

Contest - Fiction
Robin Tung is a Taiwanese American writer, mother, and contemporary art enthusiast. Her work has appeared in Art Practical, Black Warrior Review, Daily Serving, The Montreal Review, NANO Fiction,… Read more »
Daniel Rousseau
Staring Down the Barrel

Daniel Rousseau - Staring Down the Barrel

Contest - Creative Nonfiction
Daniel Rousseau’s work—noted in The Best American Essays twice—has appeared in The Florida Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in writing from… Read more »
Aekta Khubchandani
You have stopped going

Aekta Khubchandani - You have stopped going

Contest - Poetry
Aekta Khubchandani is a writer and poet from Bombay. She is the founder of Poetry Plant Project, where she conducts month-long poetry workshops. She is enrolled in a dual MFA program in poetry and… Read more »

You have stopped going - Poetry

Aekta Khubchandani

to grocery stores to listen to the sound of people while you’d wait in the queue. When you lose someone to the open breast of earth, your death inches forward; death is a singular and multiplying component of life. The moment you’re captured as a jpeg you disappear from the living scene to a picturescape. The wind on a whim, whiff of chicory from your coffee, you consume films, hoard books, hang your arms over the bed, the sun lifts the sky up, you draw blinds and dream of a dragonfly getting bigger and closer until you squeeze your eyes like a lemon slice, blacken the visual of the fly with your quilt and wake up. If you miss someone, you send them tomatoes. You look for heirloom varieties: white wonder, brandywine, evergreen, black cherry, marvel stripe hand pruned, all colors of an engulfed sun. A sunset is a recurring death. You visit the graveyard without reason and with tomato stalks when the sun makes thinner lines on the horizon. Isn’t planting stalks and seeds a kind of burial? You think of hill farms and orchards in Brooklyn, a crowded vegetation. You go to parks to listen to people, sitting a bench apart and enjoy looking at a dog eating tulips.
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