Writing is an act of resistance
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These Poems Don’t Come Out Right
By Bunkong Tuon The virus breathes like fire over city streets and farmland, across oceans and mountains, over YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter. The president suggests injecting the body with disinfectant to kill it. Maybe he could go first; it’s his idea after all. I’ve become a hack, ranting as if the world will heed…
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Voting in the Time of Climate Change
By Ying Wu The tide swallows most of the beach these days. Sunbathers take refuge in the reeds. And children wade in the new lagoons that stretch across the soft, loose sand. Our poles are melting. The bay spills over the sidewalk sometimes and breaches the steps of private homes. Today, in Texas, voters…
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Closet Rules
By Avra Margariti The first rule of sex doll club is, you get used to getting used. The second rule is, you will be forgotten by your human before your super-realistic, horsehair-eyelash, colored-glass eyes can blink. And blink we did. Here in the storage closet: slumped, folded, no longer expected to perform. The darkness…
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Mother’s Letter to Her Best Friend
By Penny Perry June 5, 1942 Dear Isabel, I drove my sister to the doctor’s in Los Angeles. It all happened so quickly. I promised to bring her a chocolate phosphate when it was over. She joked with the nurses. Told them if she puked from ether she would buy each of them a pair…
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Your vote is your voice. Su voto es su voz.
Be loud—vote! We are often told that our votes don’t matter. But if our votes held no power, no one would try to silence us. That’s why we partnered with artists and MoveOn to create “Your Vote is Power,” an art-centered initiative to inspire young people and people of color to register and vote in November. We…
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Stringing Them
By William Palmer He catches them each day, stringing them through their gills, his trumpeteers trailing in dark water, mouths drawn open, eyes puckered shut. William Palmer’s poetry has appeared in J Journal, Poetry East, and Salamander. He has published two chapbooks—A String of Blue Lights and Humble—and has been interviewed by Grace Cavalieri for The Poet and the…
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Unknowns
By Robin Q. Malin There’s a lot of things I don’t know. I don’t know what I believe. I don’t know who I love. All I know right now is that when I look into her eyes I long to trace her cheekbones, to touch her lips, to stroke her cherry colored hair under…
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Welfare Check East of Downtown
By Christie Valentin-Bati “It is 2020. Everything is canceled except for police terror.” –Nick Estes They said close down everything non-essential: The coffee shop, blue trimmed with a green porch, white-potted flowers that hung down from the awning, closed – so I roasted my own coffee. The outlet mall with high-waisted jeans, gold-plated, pearl…
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The Spectators
By D.A. Gray We’d grown thin during the pandemic. I don’t know when it began. Years ago, I think. When we began to look at neighbors with contempt, to walk head down into the house from the car, looking neither left nor right. Something broken in us and we would enter the house and…