For Issue 8 Each editor was asked to pick a theme. Ryka Aoki will be reading fiction on the theme of Abundance. Read on to learn more. Ryka Aoki, our fiction editor for issue 8, is the author of Seasonal Velocities, He Mele a Hilo (A Hilo Song) and Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul. She has been … Continue reading
It all started when dad made me sign up for football. I was really little, and when I told him I didn’t want to, he said, “It will turn you into the man you’re going to become,” and we didn’t say anything else for the rest of the car ride. And, looking back on it, I guess he was right, but not for the reasons he thought. Continue reading
Womb In my dream, it had green eyes and light-brown skin. I couldn’t make out a gender, and none of the doctors in the white room I stood in spoke of one. It looked up at me with those big green eyes, almost reptilian. I was terrified. It was mine, I was sure, but its … Continue reading
I remember childhood as the dirt on my feet and how my gold anklets jingled when I ran across the street. The red strings tied around my wrists, the first apartment we grew up in. Summers full of bug bites and melted ice cream. Sleeping parents and car alarms. I want to give that to someone. Continue reading
He asks if the roar of the engine is loud and I want to say like the belly of a slouching beast, because it’s not all false, but instead I say how close we come to the sun. His hand spans my back in slow circles, and he tells me again to open it. And I say, I tried, it wasn’t a success.
Kissing him, there’s an urgency, and the feeling that if I don’t leave the house now, it’ll burn down around us.
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If ever there came a moment you wanted someone to tell you to stay, to unpack, to quash any lingering doubts, it is now. But of course these moments only happen in films, the earnest entreaties sputtered out over a sorrowful score. You anticipate his response in that dramatized scenario: “I don’t want that kind of power over anyone else.” Continue reading
Our fiction editor for February and March is Dawnie Walton, who is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, NY. As a 2015 fiction fellow at the MacDowell Colony, she continued work on her first novel, a faux oral history about an art-rock duo in the early 1970s. She has been a managing editor for … Continue reading
He feels the absence of the natural world. Seasons are reduced to a variation in coats and umbrellas. The cycles of day and night are revealed only in the size of the crowd and in subtle expressions he is not sure he can render. Continue reading
I have conditioned myself to ignore silence, trained myself to rely on what I see for an understanding of the universe and all that surrounds me within it. Continue reading
I remember how she used to get letters from her sister who survived the war and went back to Poland… My mom would take the letters and slip into the bedroom and close the door. She didn’t want anybody seeing her weep as she read them. Continue reading
The James Franco Review 