Weeds by Chelsea Biondolillo

January 2021 Today is a day when I hate my house, I hate it for all the things it will never be. For ceilings that are too high for lights in one room and too low for lights in…
January 2021 Today is a day when I hate my house, I hate it for all the things it will never be. For ceilings that are too high for lights in one room and too low for lights in…
In the gathering dusk of an afternoon that still lingers, I followed my father into the woods. He had not prospered in his first attempt to start a nursery business, the crimson-budded azalea liners withering only days after he…
January Two old men used to live next to each other. One is dead and the other is dying. The one that is dead planted a garden. The one that is dying is my father. My father sits in…
Riding the night streets wrapped in our tight young skin, brave-stupid and untamed, magic bursting from our pores like new stars. We met under the sign of the flying horse, the vacant shell of an old gas station, our…
Couch You could call the color of the upholstery rust, but it was rust chasing a pattern. Blanket Harshly fibered, it was never quite white. Arrangement She couldn’t arrange herself after what they’d done to her. Then It started…
Moores lived next door. He worked construction; she stayed home. I don’t know how old he was, but I remember that on her birthday, she turned twenty-two. It seemed old. I was twelve. Moores had a baby, Sidney. Their…
Essay by Jahzerah Brooks • The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival is, at its core, a story about tearing down and building up. In this debut novel set against the backdrop of a working carnival and a wartime munitions factory,…
The way Appa held the sponge-tipped brush of white shoe polish. The way he ran the snowy viscosity over my scuffed canvas shoes, on top of the laces, around the eyelets. The way he placed my shoes under the…
You are walking home from school. The year is 1983 and you’re 9 or 11 or 13, some awkward age when even the air hurts your thin skin. Maybe it’s the hole in the ozone the news is just…
Later, after my uncle’s suicide, the gun cabinet would be moved into the attic, but in the early eighties it still stood in the upstairs hall, just outside my bedroom door. An unassuming wooden display case with twin glass-paned…
I started this piece years ago, after talking about the American “prepper” movement with some friends here in Spain. What began as a simple sketch of a silly boyhood fantasy soon evolved into something much deeper, and darker. As it tends to do, the act of writing became an act not of teaching, but learning; not of showing, but finding. All the dots had always been there—I only had to start writing to finally connect them.
It’s been a long time since I believed my work could change the world, but maybe it can help explain some small part of it. While I wouldn’t say I saw the events of January 6, 2021 coming, they definitely didn’t surprise me. Who knows? But for The Clash and the guidance of elders who finally wised up to the lies we were all expected to live by, I might have been at the Capitol that day—playing the victim, waving a flag, making a mockery of a country I claimed to love.
CHARLIE GEER is the author of the novel Outbound: The Curious Secession of Latter-Day Charleston and ¿Qué Dices, Teacher?, a collection of essays in Spanish. Follow him online at @amerizano.