Josie uses her key to let herself and her sister Amy into Cora’s apartment. She walks in first, then turns to see Amy standing in the doorway, hand braced against the doorframe. Josie says, impatiently, “Come on.” Finally, Amy enters this apartment their mother lived in for three years, moving here after she injured her knee and at last accepted that it made no sense for an older woman to be living in a house with two sets of stairs. But Amy has never seen it, because she’s so stubb...| X-R-A-Y
On the Fourth of July the grandmother took Vase to the top of the warehouse where a rickety carriage of iron stairs led to the roof. The sky was as orange as a snake’s belly and smelled of powder and dust and oil. They sat without speaking watching the brilliant detonations which Vase had never seen before just as she had never seen the full horizon of sky over Los Angeles and when the grandmother felt tired Vase was sorry to have to leave the sight so soon. Vase had only been with the gr...| X-R-A-Y
Sienna Liu’s Specimen (Split/Lip Press, 2025) seeks to articulate the ineffable facets of desire. A fragmentary and lyrical hindsight finds lovers in an entanglement as fragile as it is seemingly unwise. Not only an interrogation of memoir, of the compulsion to write other people onto the page, but a probing commentary on the price and rewards of setting out on such a task. When we look back, what do we ask of those who reach out in memory? I spoke to the author about this plaintive and dis...| X-R-A-Y
The babies are all born with phones in their hands. It hadn’t always been this way, but the babies needed a way to call poison control at their own leisure. At night, we hear the babies babble into their phones as we weep into our empty hands, while the soothing tones of the poison control operator tell them how to save themselves. The post BABY PHONES by Elena Zhang appeared first on X-R-A-Y.| X-R-A-Y
It’s another hot day, and the tide is rising. The son shoulders his father’s rifle and walks back toward the beach house thinking the reason he’s shot the hole in the tank is because his dad refused to buy him a half million follows. “Please like, comment, and subscribe.” He says, holding his phone at eye level and trying to steady his hand because he is still shaking with generational anger he will probably never understand. Water spills out onto the ground as the cat patiently w...| X-R-A-Y
The pharmacist has to get the key, which is missing for the moment. The tech apologizes. It was hanging by the fridge in the back, just yesterday. He’s not sure where it went, but the pharmacist will find it as soon she finishes filling the Lithium prescription. “Just the 300 mg, right? You guys are pausing the 150s?” Yes, 300 mgs. Once in the morning and twice at night. We’re moving down from the larger dose, but if I say, “Yes, we’re going down in the dose permanently, I hope,...| X-R-A-Y
This morning I’m hauling ass across the intersection across from the Krispy Kreme opposite the Kum & Go so I don’t get steamrolled by one of the yokels in their jacked-up pickups when some old lady in a jacked-up pickup swerves across oncoming traffic, throws open her passenger door, calls me honey and hollers for me to get in. I’m thinking she’s about to say she’s from the FBI and somebody has a hit out on me. But then she just says, You late to work, honey? I’m jogging in sweatp...| X-R-A-Y
A spider took up residence in my conservatory several months ago. It’s not enormous, half an inch in diameter, but I hate spiders. Winter loomed. Those were days of dread. A seasonal terror gnaws at people who live at northern latitudes as the sun sets incrementally sooner. Here in Cornwall, the exact time of sunset means little when clouds and rain can make it night-ish at three. Having a spider suspended overhead by the door, just over my clothes-drying rack, doesn’t help when my inside...| X-R-A-Y
In 2023, I published a novel called Pure Cosmos Club. For reasons still unclear to me, it was embraced by the downtown New York literary scene loosely known as “Dimes Square.” Despite the association, I never made real inroads—not because of the rumors (funded by Peter Thiel? Christian reactionaries?) but simply because I was too shy. One of the scene’s more prominent figures is Noah Kumin, founder of The Mars Review of Books. From afar, I watched his profile rise through various vent...| X-R-A-Y
When Mother’s belly bloomed again, she pointed a french-tipped finger at the richest man in town. The accusation, though baseless, haunted him– it polluted his polished lawn, noosed his silk ties. This was a man shrunken, a spirit corrupted, a man of real stature driven sick. But the town was small, and Mother was only getting bigger, and so he wished her away with a lump sum. Mother had two girls at home. The little one, blue-eyed and painted with the peachy, airbrushed skin of Jesus, th...| X-R-A-Y
MORE American Air by Mike Topp Add to Cart $25 | Perfect bound | 72 pages Paperback | Die-cut matte cover | 7×7″ Mike Topp’s poems defy categorization. That’s why they are beloved by seamstresses, pathologists, blackmailers and art collectors. –Sparrow Recent Issues Merch!| X-R-A-Y
I heard my liver slapping onto the tile floor. My pancreas half falling out of me, hanging all the way down into the sink with my old skin.| X-R-A-Y