Put every person on earth into space. This way they’ll see our orb for what it is, a brittle particle in a vast and infinite blank nothing. We’ll send one person at a time. Everything has more meaning when you’re alone.
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Some Theories of Time Travel by Malka Gould
I’m not sure when I lost the barriers I had so carefully cultivated, when I found myself like some kind of throbbing nerve in city after city. Kissing strangers and looking for friends, and answers, and places to sleep.
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Where We Stay by Suzanne Manizza Roszak
One night I dreamed that my mother was pulling favors for me in a version of the afterlife that seemed more carnivalesque than majestic. There were arcade games and she was playing them on my behalf, racking up points and prizes to barter for my survival in a world of lost, dissolving girls and insistent, concrete things.
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Hypoxic Euphoria by Ellee Achten
I watched sound escape me in wobbling circles of air, my body moving farther from my voice and from the surface where my calls popped without being heard.
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Two Poems by Anne Barngrover
Gaze upon my glowing dress, / ever spooled and spiraled. Trail my creeping rootstock / back to where I first learned the definition of grace / and how it always seemed like blackmail.
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The Runaway Restaurant by Tessa Yang
I pictured a tiny window opening in my sternum: out whooshed all my fears like a cloud of bats. I really believed I could do this. I could bring our daughter home.
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Black. Wild. Laughing. Revisiting Danez Smith’s Homie and Reading at Fresno State by Angel Gonzales
Smith is writing from the margins, not about them, centering on all the things that are often denied, like love, tenderness, pain, friendship, and most importantly, joy. But there is no way around it, as Smith says when speaking about their process for self-care after writing about Black trauma.
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The Limiting Value of Trauma by Annie Erlyn
The trigger in my mind ticks like a small time-bomb, cratering my concentration with holes.
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Voicemail by Caroline Chavatel
I gargle salt every night, spit on my paper cuts & watch them ooze.
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What Grew From The Earth by Lorinda Toledo
Girls, she knew, did what they could for each other. Boys, though. They grew into men.
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Juan Felipe Herrera has said of Sara Borjas’ first book, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff, “This is a groundbreaker. Good-bye to fashionable old stuff, adios to the graspable that can never be touched. Come to the fearless. A brava-shaking collection.” It has been referred to as autobiographical, but it is more a consideration of the speaker’s identity, place, loss, love, and perseverance.
A Normal Interview With Sarah Borjas
When we are heartbroken, we aren’t at a loss. We are resourceful. We are still here.
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Nurse Dog by Sarah Kasbeer
You feel like you’re wearing your body as a suit and suddenly you want to unzip it and leave it by the bedside. You feel smothered by something you can only identify as yourself.
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Hallelujah the Blind Gifts by Katherine E. Standefer
Oh Hallelujah the blind gifts, the foundation of all privilege. Hallelujah what we might call innocence, the idea that before things got fucked up they were once good.
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