Cardi B. Scores a Hit Album
by Donney Rose issue 70 and somewhere a hood Black girl/is being kicked out of a class/for her alleged attitude/ is being told that her stance/her mouth her body/is too wild for America’s comfortis training her tear ducts to/not give a fuck/not give a shit/to feel as indifferent about being active/as America feels about her […]
Two Poems
by E. Kristin Anderson issue 71 a headache, the daughter things started out in shells // I could see the quiet argument //a bad summer to be temporary girls // all sick on the beach // I never stayed before // voice wishful // right away, a cold rain // I found acid sleep […]
coming home for the census
by Adelina Rose Gowans issue 75 sure, we went bloat-eyed and buzzy when the neighbors down rawl road waged war with each other—christened their property line the two-way gates of heaven and built that barbed-wire fence to keep each other out, but that’s old news. the iga’s stocking dairy-free yogurt now. dogs and […]
Comprehensive (hension) Blues
by Ralph Adamo issue 62 The moon is blue I sense myself thought of (by you, you) — derangement, chance, dreaming, quoting despised old teachers in a pinch — [why impecunious is Latin] so sometimes I miss being devoured — having to hold my own face in my own hands sitting in just a chair […]
Echolocation
by Mark Wagenarr issue 73 “In goldfish heaven there’s peace & calm,” my father once said when I told him my dreams: swimming through dark waters with bodies I could not identify. Three years old, I looked up through the tub water & saw the bathroom lights, like the lights of a bathysphere diving to a wreck. Years later, […]
Days at Laclede Place
by Anuradha Bhowmik issue 67 My friends rode low bikes and Razor scooters to the blue vinyl-sided triplex and knocked on the deadbolt door to ask Ma if I could come out. She never let me leave the parking lot, so I saved colored chalk for hopscotch. The boys brought a boombox and Andy Capp’s […]
love poem: dezireé
by dezireé a. brown issue 70 You touch / yourself / in the mirror name / each scar with chewed / hands It is time / to tell you the story of our revival / of how this […]
Goodnight Lyric
by Kristina Marie Darling issue 67 A clasped hand is rarely safe, especially in the spring. That day everything in Rome was burning: the chapel,the little school in Trastevere, and the restaurant, with its ostentatious display of carved ice. Now the longgoodbye, the final exchange of gifts. Because theirnarrative is not specific to a particular year, it […]
Homecoming (Langenthal)
by Daniele Pantano issue 71 The afternoon bell peals the children out of school. They say it’s great to see you after all these years. You can’t look at them. But you believe them. The missing parents are wading through the rust. You can’t make yourself believe in the end of winter. Back in the […]
Cushion & Frame
by Rebecca Kuder issue 72 “Everything reminded you of what happened.” —Rachel McKibbens Everything reminds you of what happened. It powders the shelf you use as a nightstand, the shelf your daughter will someday use as a dollhouse; it snows and settles between the threads of your sheets, infiltrates the fur of your stuffed Snoopy; […]