When I was a little girl I believed there was a clock in my heart, one with little hands that would tick forever. I wish someone had told me how easily those hands could be broken, how quickly the clock could stop, how there is no rewind button. If I had known, I would have [...]

I. Chinese mythology tells a story of the crow in the birthing of the world. Ten sun crows roosted in ten different suns orbiting the Earth, where they perched on red mulberry trees, with mouths opening up at the ends of their branches. Each day, one sun crow would drag a carriage across the sky, [...]

When my therapist encouraged me to draw again, for the fourth or so consecutive time, met by reluctance and deflated weariness of art in general, he didn’t think his patient’s first attempt would be of a suicide in Aokigahara, a forest in Japan also known as the “Sea of Trees,” the second most popular place [...]

Click here to view “How Furniture Feels” by Fatimah Asghar. Because of its format, this essay is available only as a PDF.     More nonfiction at Used Furniture.

I. Jesus stands shoulders and wrists rope-bound beside a scroll-wielding Pilate, appearing expressionless, haloed. No filth dirties up the building, no sense of age in the architecture. No raw sewage strews a gutter. Everything then was new, a world so young even the distant mountains sit wrinkleless. Roman soldiers jeer in the background. Said background [...]

The graffiti outline looks similar to the black and white optical illusion street missionaries hold up to your face when you walk along Venice Beach. Stare at it long enough and you’ll see the face of Jesus. Only this stenciled image is the color of Henna, contrasted with the mucky, stucco white of a wall [...]

An Echo; A Stain is an excerpt from William Henderson’s in-progress memoir, House of Cards. *** I’ve been grieving, not just for you, but for our when-not-if future. All of the plans and dreams I had had in my head are gone. I heard somewhere that you have to give up the life you planned [...]

Every four or five years, it seems, Frederick Barthelme and I exchange a few e-mails about Ray Carver, Gordon Lish, and the edit job that Lish did on Carver back in the day. Barthelme never initiates this recurrent conversation, it’s always me; he hasn’t changed his mind, I have. Finally, I interviewed Barthelme on the [...]

When I read a good poem, I want to jam out each line and hot glue fragments to my bare-chested nipples, to truly embody the poem. I want to hustle on the corner for eight hours a day as a performance art piece called My Nipples Burn For Truth. It would bring grown men to [...]

I wanted to be on Barney. I wanted to be famous. I thought if I got on Barney then I would be famous. Jesus. That’s weird. That I wanted that. I just wanted to be one of those kids. They were happy. I was happy too. They could sing. So could I. I think I [...]