By Leslie McGrath The almond wears a thin corduroy vest that cannot protect the nut. The skin of a ripe peach peels like a second degree burn. The oyster clenches even as we break its nacreous wings at the hinge to get at the meat. When the mushroom man appeared with baskets braceleted up to [...]
By John Robilotta I sit on my lanai three flights above the water’s edge. Shore life comes and goes. Black and white ibis, with their elongated beaks, feed on the shoreline. A great blue heron suns on the far banks. Anhingas and cormorants dry their wings atop stone outcroppings. There is much life about the [...]
By Rae Hoffman Jager To David Wallace-Wells While we slept, awoke, and made oatmeal, went to work, walked the dog, and so on, A crack in the ice shelf grew 11 mile— raced the ocean where it dropped with a titanic splash no one heard. As we make messes, more icebergs calve far off— tons [...]
By Arturo Desimone The maritime guards stopped the half-naked, very tall animal-headed strangers on their boats Asked them “Show your papers, please” “All we have are these roses. Yellow and red given to us, a gift, they were once showered upon us from the earth shot from the first catapults, made to launch pure prayer, [...]
By Andrea Ciannavei I am not financially literate. My chaos with money leads me to behave desperately. Always borrowing. Always paying back. A text message came through on Saturday. A marshal had taken possession of the apartment I kept in New York. I had been withholding rent. I’m broke. Eviction proceedings went forward and no [...]
By Rachel Custer The woods call to me, too, from across this road, from away from here, from the opposite of houses filled with tired people, from the constant grasping of small hands that might as well own me. Who wouldn’t be calmed by a path through the grabbing branches? Still I don’t go to [...]
By James Butt Nate supposed it’d been the circus owner Charlie Sparks’ fault, with his hanging of old Murderous Mary, but that’d been a hundred years ago and Nate couldn’t understand the wisdom of doing such things today. “I like the card stock it’s printed on,” Elijah said. “Something you’d see for a carnival, or [...]
By Mbizo Chirasha Pain scribbled signatures in these mothers’ buttocks, War tied ropes of struggle around these mothers’ necks. Songs of suffering are sung and unheard in the congregations of townships and mountains searching for freedoms’ seeds. The seeds of these mothers’ wombs yearn for a freedom too far away to be harvested, but not forgotten. [...]
By Elisabeth Horan I’ve been left out They had a baby shower without me I’m not pregnant right now but I can still be pretty fun sometimes They’re constructing a pipeline, Under rivers of bones and shale Through the homes of the earthworms Didn’t ask the worms if that was ok Didn’t ask me either They [...]
Translation by Süleyman Soydemir and the Turkish Youth From an anonymous variant of a military drill song, "Gündoğdu Marşı," or "The Sunrise Anthem," was a symbol of the anti-fascist Turkish resistance in the 1960s and 70s. Today, it serves as a symbol of hope in the face of an increasingly authoritarian regime. [...]
By Jaime Gonzalez I remember it in sequential order, in the same way, no matter how or when I think about it. It was a month into the 2016 winter term at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, and we were on a five-minute break from my history class. Consistent with every other break, the first [...]
Charlottesville, Virginia, August 12, 2017 By Kathi Wolfe You said I was a has-been — my day was done. You wish! I’ve been undercover, before your unseeing eyes. I shaved my moustache, changed my accent, Tweeted — ordered lattes at Starbucks. In khakis and polo shirts, I was the boy next door. My torches were kept [...]
By R.R. Marsh #MeToo. It took me several moments to post the words on my Facebook account. I had to think through my past—a place I generally prefer to avoid—and consider events I had ignored for quite some time. Had I been a victim of sexual assault? Or was I fashioning mere slips of male [...]
By Jackleen Holton Hookway This world is just a little place, just the red in the sky, before the sun rises, so let us keep fast hold of hands, that when the birds begin, none of us be missing. –Emily Dickinson A sapling shakes, and a gust of new red-crested finches are launched into a sky [...]
By mica woods if you took a telescope to the sky 200 lightyears away happened to point it down on this country, would you see the slaughter and the selling by those men we carry memories of in our pockets or would you not notice the labor in the fields as different from the digging crews [...]
