Angelenos call the phenomenon of swarming water bees
a congregation as in a church
Early Days by Carol M. Quinn
Lisa will not sit down, will not shut her eyes any longer than it takes to blink, because when she does, she has learned, her muscles begin to release and the room lilts gently from one side to the other and she cannot trust her arms to keep hold of her baby.
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A Groovy Way to Grab a Musical Bag that Turns On the Sounds of Today by Joe Bonomo
The voice to which I’m only half-listening sounds familiar, but something’s off, also. I look up blankly from the records I’m riffling through and realize that I’m hearing Elton John, one of his well-known hits from the early seventies, but I haven’t heard this version before.
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Take a Ride in My Jag by Catherine Cort
Jags can be time-consuming. And then there is the problem of satisfying its animalistic nature. Especially since tonight is Friday night, and you are going out.
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And Now That I Am 51 by Lisa Allen
The women who raised me were plain./ Devout./ Called whores if they rouged their cheeks/
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A Come to Jesus Moment in the Gynecologist’s Office by Frederica Morgan Davis
Did so many women come in with babies growing inside them that Jesus acknowledged that plural? Or was it just a nice Southern thing? Like the French “vous,” used in singular formal to show respect to elders?
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Two Poems by Sarah Hansen
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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Scrolls by Miles Liss
Our Breath./ They took what was theirs.
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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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Friends 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.
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What 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.
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Two Poems by Alana de Hinojosa
I took so long to learn / the black in pockets is you
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Two Poems by Victoria Chang
Somewhere, in the morning, my mother / had become the sketch.
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Three Poems by Sandra Beasley
You are the sunburn / where there is no sun, a canary nested / in the ribcage of a miner.
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De 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
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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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