Hannah Tishkoff, Beginning of a Poem, 2026, colored pencil on found wood, 9 x 9.5 x 1 in, from issue no. 256. Courtesy of Hannah Tishkoff and OCHI, photograph by Deen Babakhyi.

In the airport the bald man with the salt-and-pepper mustache is saying to three women, Unless you’re a comedian—listen to me—unless you’re a comedian, it’s not smart to have a favorite expression.

In the mirror I see a bug crawl down my face, eliciting curses. But it’s just a dark wound in the mirror, an immobile injury to the silver. My eyes have gotten so bad that everything’s a bug.

In the raised drain-stopper I see my miniaturized face, with a long glass horn emerging from my forehead—the tap’s steady gush.

In Edward P. Vining’s An Inglorious Columbus (1885), a massive, labyrinthine book presenting “Evidence That Hwui Shän and a Party of Buddhist Monks from Afghanistan Discovered America in the Fifth Century, A.D.,” we find “that large armies of mice occasionally migrate from Asia to America, or in the other direction.” Probably not unrelatedly: a UPI article of April 1996 reports that an Ohio man was indicted for ordering vials of bubonic plague bacteria, which he claimed he needed to defeat a horde of disease-bearing rats deployed by Iraq against the United States. Read More

The boys with their van. Photograph courtesy of the author.

My dad used to take me to work with him. He worked at a group home for juvenile delinquents. I remember playing on the floor of a windowless office one afternoon—zooming some toy cars around—when the door kicked open and a teenager flew in. The kid smacked hard against the polished tile floor with the weight of two grown men on top of him. They were trying to calm him down, and his face was pink and wet with tears. He was screaming.

I was five years old. I scooted my cars back into a corner and went on playing.

Such scenes were part of my childhood. These were pretty desperate boys, twelve to eighteen years old, ten of them living together on the grounds of an old tuberculosis hospital. I remember a redbrick home with many rooms—what used to be apartments for nurses—way up on a hill, the path to it winding through the trees. Sometimes the new boys—orientation phases—would tear off down the hill on foot and try to make it into town. This was eastern Kentucky in the eighties. Near the home was a highway, a gas station, and a rundown motel where a man had murdered his wife. That was about it.

Dad was pretty good at finding the boys who wanted to be found, but if you stole a car or broke into somebody’s house, he couldn’t take you back. It was a community-relations issue. Two boys stole my mom’s car once and drove it into a ditch, totaling it. Another boy ran off and no one ever heard from him again. He was fourteen years old, but it said in his file he was a prostitute, and everyone was pretty sure that was the life he’d gone back to—that he’d made it down to the highway and caught a ride.

There were worse places to be than a group home—you could be locked up in a camp, a hundred serious delinquents out in the middle of nowhere, staff not at all hesitant to put their hands on you—but some of the boys didn’t know this yet. My dad was the youngest treatment director in the state. He took his boys everywhere—to movies, baseball games, five hundred miles away to the beach. Some of them had never been out of the projects except to be sent to a home. They thought Louisville was the world. Dad would load them into an old Ford Econoline van and the boys would tell their stories, what they called their “past histories,” and I would wedge in beside them and listen. Read More