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Your Time Has Come

* * *Light from the ferry’s windowmixed along the floor.Alone, we wait to be delivered.* * *Two new sparrows,the tourists don’t knowthey’re new.* * *Too tired to writeand this… More

Sunshine

They told Grace they’d found her curled into a nest of leaves, that since dawn they’d been following a strange spoor through the bush, and then, just as they’d… More

Somebody Please Tell Me Who I Am

1The knife came out of nowhere.Ben Bright sprang back. His arm knocked the weapon into the shadows and nearly clocked his best friend, Niko Petropoulos.“Nervous, are we?” Niko said.Ben… More

PEN Appeal: Pedro Argüelles Morán

March 18, 2011 Raúl Castro Ruz Presidente c/o Cuban Interests Section 2639 16th St, NW Washington, DC 20009 Fax: (202) 797-8521 General Abelardo Coloma Ibarra Ministro del Interior y Prisiones c/o Cuban Interests Section 2639 16th St, NW Washington, DC… More

War and Peace

In Fall 2000, I was beginning my second year of teaching in South Los Angeles. I was pumped up. Even though I am a White girl who grew up… More

Rob Spillman: Eye of the Outsider

James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce, set in Southern California at the time when the roaring ’20s was turning into the low, depressed growl of the ’30s, captures an era… More

An Accident in August

The worst of it, thought Lou, is that I could just as easily have stopped.She switched off the ignition. She leaned her head back against the headrest, and shut… More

Leeches

Now, six years after the fact, I realize things might have gone differently, but back then, on Sunday, March 8, 1998, when it all began, it was impossible to… More