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 November and December is Ahsan Butt, who recently published an essay for our emergency issue, as well as fiction in issue 1. Ahsan is a writer and essayist. He was born in Toronto, is of Pakistani descent, and currently lives with his wife in Los Angeles. His short-fiction and essays have … Continue reading
A Muslim who does not practice or believe is generally regarded as safe. It is in the act of prayer that I become potentially dangerous. Continue reading
Starting on September 15th we’ll be releasing a special issue of The James Franco Review: Art You Engaged/Are you engaged? Writers, editors, and artists around the country explored what it meant for them to be politically or consciously engaged in their work and to also examine literature’s relationship to safety. Every time I read … Continue reading
Red Eye by Ahsan Butt Stuck. Laid over between the place I was born and the place I live. Four a.m. spent spacing out, stretching against a stiff seat, legs laid out on my Hilfiger bag. Denim man in the row behind me has never seen anything like me. Black greasy hair of … Continue reading
The James Franco Review 