Racial Nepotism Does Not Mean What You Think It Means

Brown Writers Who Read Other Brown Writers

[racialnepotism]

Fiction by Monica Lewis

Standing up from the bed and looking me over, he mutters. I giggle. “I don't know Spanish.” “I thought you were Dominican,” he says. There is a weird pause. “What are you?”

"I’m drunk, which is good. His kisses are wet and his lips suck my entire mouth, like kissing a vacuum cleaner. I know he’s planting hickies all over my neck—lotsa little ruby stars." -- Monica Lewis

Nepotized by Victoria Cho

[racialnepotism]

“Remarking remarks on a peg republic of wall, I can resist

my own weight on braided wire. Double it, in the eggy heath.” -- Jae Choi

Nepotized by Wendy Chin-Tanner

[racialnepotism]

Verse Daily, a quality online web anthology of poetry. A poem a day, along with our complete archives, and poem selections from the web.

“I fashioned an acre, made moderate the interior. Pinned in the crickets with their decent clicking. At the end of July appeared one animal.” -- Janine Oshiro

Nepotized by Wendy Chin-Tanner

[racialnepotism]

Victoria Cho A cat crawls into the crevice underneath the furnace The lumberjack&rsq...

"I am a body of fundamental properties and beguiling elements

The lumberjack sings of his youth and touches my wrists

An attempt to induce sleep in me

I sprint towards the river bloated with mosquitoes

When I kneel, I can’t remember

If the position is for sorrow or surrender" -- Victoria Cho

Nepotized by Monica Lewis

[racialnepotism]

Catapult | Imposter by Alexander Chee

by Alexander Chee. “I went to the elevator and when the doors opened, there was Chloë Sevigny,...

"I think writers are often terrifying to normal people, i.e. non writers in a capitalist system, for this reason: there is almost nothing they will not sell in order to have this time. Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy more than acclaim."  -- Alexander Chee

Nepotized by Glendaliz Camacho

[racialnepotism]

“Tonight, the sky is read as woman. It is 3 AM. The sun has not befriended the sky in hours. Regrettably, a red stain (name it: blood, menstruation, the failure of sperm to saturate egg, said again: the failure of woman to invite man into her body, to penetrate one        solitary        lonely         fretful        egg: yes, blood) has summoned a woman from the heat of a tongue she could sink her body in. It is 3:00 in the morning. The blood that swelters her stomach is not (like) the sky swelling night.” -- Metta Sama

Nepotized by Racquel Goodison

[racialnepotism]

"If you’ve kissed bricks in secret or fallen asleep where there was no bed or spent time lighting a fire, then you know the beginning of love and maybe you know the end of it too, and maybe you know the far ends, the doors, where loved ones enter to check on you. It’s not someone else speaking when you hear I love you. It’s only the nighttime pouring into the breast’s day." -- Patrick Rosal

Nepotized by Karissa Chen

[racialnepotism]

"Souvenirs: An Excerpt," new fiction by T. Kira Madden on KROnline.

"The children were not home when the officers came knocking. They were not nestled between the front seats or peeking behind the curtains. They were not leap-frogging or squatting beneath the steering wheel. They were not underneath the clothes. They were not tucked into the bed, two letter Cs, stomach to back. They were not curled up beside the potted three-foot tree where Fiona was tying cassette tape ribbons—Knots. Never, ever bows—along the few, prickling branches (the songs stretched and torn: Patsy Montana, Skeeter Davis), the tree’s arms drooping with sparkling pinecones the children’s hands had rolled in glue and tinsel themselves, beside the fifth window near the center of the bus, the few presents wrapped in foil (because they still had presents then: felt mittens, jacks, mint chocolate, a yarn doll named Cassandra—Bonnie’s lips tight as a balloon knot when she opened the gift the next morning, tears swelling over new, awkward teeth, gnawing at the doll’s hair)." -- T Kira Madden

Nepotized by Karissa Chen

[racialnepotism]

MUZZLE MAGAZINE

"Will you hold her morning prayers, her drum roll of tongues? And when you hold me, will you hold only the stars inked to my ankle, or will you hold my sister’s skinny arm when I beat it out of its socket?" -- Eugenia Leigh

Nepotized by Karissa Chen

[racialnepotism]

"Because you make that pork recipe you found / in the Frida Khalo Cookbook. Because when you read / that essay about Rilke, you underlined the whole thing / except the part where Rilke says love means to deny the self / and to be consumed in flames." -- Matthew Olzmann

Nepotized by Karissa Chen

[racialnepotism]

“The first time I met Deena, she killed someone I loved.” -- Alice Sola Kim

Nepotized by Anna Cabe

[racialnepotism]

Poetry: “Here’s / the room with everyone in it.”

“Your father is only your father/until one of you forgets. Like how the spine/won’t remember its wings/no matter how many times our knees/kiss the pavement.” -- Ocean Vuong

Nepotized by Jai Chakrabarti

[racialnepotism]

Karissa Chen: Pomegranate

Flash Fiction: Her name sounding like coming, like arrived, like I am here.

"Shi liu like blood. Shi liu like home. Shi liu, trove of pain and blame. The cart was gaining momentum. My friend nudged me, said, Your mother is waving, but I was biting, savoring the burst of red honey on my tongue.

Shi liu, a torrent, swiftly moving away.

When I looked up, we were rounding the bend. My mother was gone." -- Karissa Chen

Nepotized by Melissa R. Sipin

[racialnepotism]

The Forgetting Tree | Rae Paris

What kind of person walks over the bones of slaves? / What kind of person is a slave to bones?

"Where do you want to go? I’ll take you anywhere. To your mother? Your father? Their bent faces at your memorial in New York. To the sweet, new candy you bought on your way home. To the girl on the phone right before he shot you. Let’s go there, to a moment of your breath. Let’s stay here. If we could, just tell me, please. Let’s never move again." -- Rae Paris

Nepotized by Melissa R. Sipin

[racialnepotism]

"Years later, I’d be in a different alley with friends of my own, and one of the guys, high off a can of spray paint, would absentmindedly light a cigarette after taking a hit and his face would burst into a sheet of blue flames. He ran around the alley wild with panic, running into the sides of the buildings, stumbling and falling and getting back to his feet again, hands flying violently around his burning face as if trying to beat back a swarm of attacking insects. He never made a sound, just ran around that alley with his face on fire, the flames catching in his hair and his clothes, looking like some giant ignited match in the shape of a man. For a second, we couldn’t quite comprehend what was happening—some of us laughed, most of us were just stunned—before I managed to chase the boy down, tackle him to the ground, and beat out the flames from his face with my T-shirt. His eyes were wild with terror and we just stared at each other for a moment before he started to weep hysterically, his body shaking under mine, the terrible scent of burnt flesh and singed hair filling the alley. His lashes and eyebrows had been burned cleanly off his face. His eyelids were raw, pink. His face began to swell immediately, large white welts blooming here and there. And he just kept on crying beneath me, calling for his mother and father, blubbering incoherently in the high, desperate voice of a child." -- Rattawut Lapcharoensap

Nepotized by Melissa R. Sipin

[racialnepotism]

New fiction by Mai Nardone on KROnline.

"Women are meant to be Thai. That’s what your buddy Phil told you before you flew over from the States and became the man you’d sworn you’d never be, sitting at this strip bar with a woman, no, a girl, who you can only describe as a flower. Not because she’s pretty—she’s not pretty—but because of the way she leans towards you with an open face that’s as painted and perfumed as a false rose, glistening under a sheen of plastic moisture, the mouth widening in a way that reminds you of what’s between her legs." -- Mai Nardone

Nepotized by Melissa R. Sipin

[racialnepotism]

"My mother was thirty miles away, back in our old roach-infested apartment in Palms. It’d been a month since I’d seen her and it was going to be four more until I’d see her again. We no longer had scheduled visitations but I would see her every six months at children’s court in Monterey Park. I could never fully escape her." -- Melissa Chadburn

Nepotized by Melissa R. Sipin