I hardly dared open my mouth, even to say something innocuous like “Sure, I’m hungry. I could eat dinner.” My words might be analyzed to reveal something knotty, something sinister I didn’t know I felt but really ought to know I felt.
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In the Rearview by Gaye Brown
When you become invisible, as widows do, you welcome opportunities to reappear.
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The Sick Diet by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
because you left a good-bye note written on paper made of mummies.
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The Elephant by Riley Kross
My wife kept to her alcove. I kept to my nook. The elephant played between us.
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The Things Not Seen by Krista Lee Hanson
If you are going to stare. If we must be so visible. I want you to know some of the depth, the multitude, the layers of us.
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Joy and Pain, Sunshine and Rain: On Teaching/Reading Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Even when his poems take a darker turn, such as recalling the murder of a friend and colleague, or the bittersweet memory of a childhood crush who has since passed away—there are moments of true grace within these elegies—a slowing down, not in pacing but in memory’s leaps.
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The Last Kiss by Lawdenmarc Decamora
I stay alive though, sensing velocity
as an ambulance would in a dream—
brisk, accidental. Remember the first time
your little bones cried for milk?
Memory Waltz by Anne Gudger
I imagined my giant Scrabble board and a pile of letter tiles. Extra vowels, too many U’s. Searching. Wanting to make sense of where I was at with my mom and where she was with herself. Do my memories get erased too when she erases hers?
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Dispatches from the Past Present, or Dick Clark's Face by Joe Bonomo
Dick Clark’s face revolving, revolving. This is no fever dream. 20 Years of Rock n’ Roll came packaged with a 'special bonus record,' a cardboard flexi disc emblazoned with, naturally, Clark’s cheery face. The record plays at 33 1/3 rpm, and in an unnerving design bug the spindle hole nailed Clark right between his eyes.
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Broom Rituals by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
This is how we broom. How we gather dust. A modified ritual of palimpsestic movement. Ceremony in cipher. How we move in the old ways that remain beyond a centuries-long violence.
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Selenium Sulfide by SJ Sindu
I’m here tonight because a week ago I woke up and discovered that my inner thighs had started turning white. Not chalk-white. White-girl white.
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Neither, Both by Nadia Born
You forgot that this is home sweet home and the shelves have a hundred different cereal boxes.
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The End of Coney Island Avenue by Roohi Choudhry
In this country, a man could be lost and no one would know enough to grieve, not even his own mother.
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Float by Marcia Aldrich
I hardly dared open my mouth, even to say something innocuous like “Sure, I’m hungry. I could eat dinner.” My words might be analyzed to reveal something knotty, something sinister I didn’t know I felt but really ought to know I felt.
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A Normal Interview with KB Brookins by James O’Bannon
Rage is a thing that has to be birthed, because we do so much course correction – or at least my experience has felt like, at multiple times, someone has done something anti-Black to me, someone has done something racist, homophobic, transphobic, and I feel, in that moment, I can’t react the way that I want to.
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Drafting a Eulogy by Hannah Feustle
We all know that this is because they recognize pain and want to do something. None of us have to name it.
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