TSW Artist in Residence, Bianca Ng, creates the featured art for Issue 12: Before After

I could talk your ear off about the current state of Mexican-American literature.

My students & co-workers worry / if I return to America, I’ll catch COVID / or a bullet in my back.

Dust remembers what we try to forget, preserves the hidden, and keeps evidence in wait.

it is a form of mothering / to hurt yourself / rather than others

I am standing at the ironing board, running a hot iron over a folded and stitched-together strip of quilting cotton to make bias tape.

anjing my mother calls you. / how dare you defy what god has given you?

The way restaurants work has never been fair — yet everyone just seems to accept it.

The first time I watched you kill a fish, you were methodical and emotionless, striking it in one blow.

I want to talk to you about awe / what it means to turn / yourself over

What makes a country great? Surely the answer doesn’t lie in vast tracts of forest land that have been converted into concrete megastructures

Four weeks. Four weeks and still the virus. Things that were once normal now seem absurd.

“I need you to do something for me,” you said as you sat across from me in the locker room.

I have wasted these curses on minor disappointments.

The true cost of dying lies beyond the sick. It buries itself in the people who try to love the sick.