Our Breath./ They took what was theirs.
Read MoreWhen 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.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreFriends Forever by Mairéad Kiernan
The point is, I could die at any moment with two living parents who would choose some tacky, pink, heart-shaped granite headstone for my grave and write Beloved Daughter on it with the emblem of a cross or some other religious symbol above my name, and that is not happening.
Read MoreWhat We Did to Hansen by David DeGusta
We started spending less time at the park, arriving home while sunlight was still on offer and confusing our parents. We paid more attention to who showed up in the park and who didn’t. Absences now felt like defections, lessening our numbers and making us vulnerable in a way that tightened our stomachs when we thought about Hansen.
Read MoreTwo Poems by Alana de Hinojosa
I took so long to learn / the black in pockets is you
Read MoreTwo Poems by Victoria Chang
Somewhere, in the morning, my mother / had become the sketch.
Read MoreThree Poems by Sandra Beasley
You are the sunburn / where there is no sun, a canary nested / in the ribcage of a miner.
Read MoreDe Domum by Melanie Conroy-Goldman
I know my house is a woman because she has a migrating trap door. I’m in the hallway. Whoops! I’m in the kitchen. I’m in the basement. Whoops! I’m in the attic. I can see the door’s outline if I pay attention and it’s possible to tiptoe very carefully around its edges, but it is easy to get distracted in the house.
Read Morebliss kids by Aureleo Sans
Children are backlogs / in the isolation tent
Read MoreTwo Poems by Lisa Huffaker
the raw energy of / threat
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreYou Think Mom Would Like It? by Steve Chang
We both know how our mom feels about us bringing things home, things we find. Strange things, she calls them. Once, I showed her this quarter I’d picked up at school. I found it in the lunchroom. I said, Look! And, gasping hard, she slapped it from my hand.
Read MoreElegy / Eulogy / Ode by Lacey N. Dunham
For months now, you have not been able to walk through the daily din into the madness, and your life has felt more textured, your days fuller, though you will not admit that you might be happier this way.
Read MoreReasons to Teach Another Year by Adam Patric Miller
Because you remember your teachers, one with wild eyes who wore a cross over his tie, who made algebraic equations turn and spin in your head, who gave you a graduation gift of Genesis in Space and Time…
Read MoreMissing by Rick Andrews
You are still learning the subways and have to ask someone which way is south once you exit the train at Lafayette; the dot on your phone is being difficult.
Read MoreTwo Poems by Kelly R. Samuels
How industrious and cheerful we appear, opening/ the water back up to the sky,
Read MoreSometimes Love Looks Like by Edie Meade
It's love in a silent spell/ tinkering in separate rooms
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