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ill wind
turn back now
the men I know are aspens
they lose the leaves
their women won’t
stoop to gather
will this pale still
sky above the city park
teach you to tunnel
to bury yourself
instead of blow
cut the sun
with cellophane
or let it burn down well
into November
what will happen
then will happen
anyhow
Jesse Lichtenstein’s work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Wired, and elsewhere.
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Draconian individual punishment distracts from systemic change and reinforces the cruelest and most racist system of incarceration on the planet.
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Fiction
“I was my father’s son. My father was Nai Nai’s least favorite.” A Taiwanese American man, driven from home by a secret, reevaluates his childhood memories of his grandmother.
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