my spine curved/ into a question mark, my pen sketching symptoms/ on an empty man's silhouette.
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Diana's Chin by Taylor Arnette
You’d paid the fourteen dollars (plus tax and service fees), sure that it was going to be in the main theater with the red fabric seats and gold façades on the ceiling. It made you feel classic. Instead, you sat in what could have been someone’s at-home projector room with ten other people, all waiting to watch a biopic about Princess Diana.
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When I Couldn’t Look at Myself in the Mirror, My Friend Looked for Me by Shifra Sharlin and Carol Troen
On the other hand, I hated the port. It turned me into a cancer machine. It frightened me, too. I couldn’t look at it. So I asked Carol to make a portrait.
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A Review of My Birth Control Methods by Victoria Buitron
I didn’t know there would be anesthesia. I didn’t know there would be blood. I didn’t know my arm would bruise Rorschach. I didn’t know the army greens and deep blues would last so long.
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A Normal Interview with SJ Sindu by Nicholas Howard
I think it’s important for writers to rediscover wonder. Without wonder, writing becomes stagnant and preachy. If you haven’t found your place of wonder yet, think about the kinds of spaces that make you ask questions, that make you see in a new way.
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A Normal Interview with K-Ming Chang by Yia Lee
I think part of writing into myth and folklore is that there’s this kind of cosmic presence, this feeling that people are people, but they’re also more than people in a way. There’s something about them that is incredibly ancient and powerful.
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A Cement Mother by Elizabeth Brus
On the toilet, a new mother discovers her head is full of cement. She drips red and yellow, squirts herself with water and lidocaine, and feels the wet cement chunks coating her throat and lapping the backs of her eye sockets.
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A Normal Interview with Dustin Prestridge, Kimiko Hahn, and Marisol Baca by Kirk Alvaro Lua
Poets are all of us — poet and not poet — building a bridge of poems with our hearts and minds and hands and languages.
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Two Poems by Leah Claire Kaminski
Now that I’ve stopped, I have more time to think about things like rocks, slightly less for thinking about self-loathing.
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A Normal Interview with Ira Sukrungruang by Melinda Medeiros
Something that I’ve really had to tell myself when writing this book was: You have to rip the Band-Aid off. You have to look at the wound for what it is. The genre of memoir—as hard as it sounds—thrives on suffering and it lives on vulnerability.
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Stinktown by Matthew Goldberg
In Stinktown, we scavenged for trash. That was our big industry. We’d sift through huge mounds of garbage, searching for stuff we could use for trading purposes.
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A Normal Interview with Kelly Gray by Shelby Pinkham
If I can line up visuals that allow you to connect to your grief, your anger, and imagine an alternative life force, while allowing you your own autonomy in thought, that feels far more consensual than me telling you what you should see, feel, do.
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No Country for Daughters by Sarah Twombly
They say this is the age of monster hunting, and we are the monsters: mothers and daughters, heroines and crones. The stench of us riles them. The sight of us sets them to howling.
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Two Poems by Lily Rose Kosmicki
A satisfied end eludes me / The hysteria of locution becomes me / Charred brain crowded and crowned / with fleshy angles feeding / of the mouthparts, crazed
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A Normal Interview with Michael Chin by Mialise Carney
I came around to the idea of this book being a lot like the storytelling I would do in early romantic relationships, when I wanted so badly to share my whole whole world with this person who felt vitally important to me, who I couldn’t wait to have fully immersed in my life and the world I’d known.
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Two Poems by Jennifer Lynn Krohn
they want a corpse, / a girl who'll only grow / skinnier with rot. A girl / who will disappear / into a handful of dust.
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Women's Work by Celeste Colgan
I never learned. In a year’s time, Mother, Buck, and the chicken coop were gone. Aunt Betty bought chickens already drawn at the meat counter. I thought a lot about beheadings.
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Door Girl by Candace Jane Opper
The whole institution seemed to exist by and for men, particularly male musicians, and more particularly male musicians who’d fully bought into the fantasy of rock and roll, which essentially resembles the kind of up-all-night debauchery romanticized in Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical Almost Famous.
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Brief Histories by Joe Bonomo
These images commingle now in memory as my first headlong descent into the strangeness of grief.
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Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Two Poems by Nicholas Gruber
i brush my cheek with a lover so bewildered by kissing, he detonates / my clenched gristle instead. in red honey clothes, i am similar flesh / & you know new lovers: always making do.
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