You are afraid you’re not strong enough for her to lie to you. You are afraid that if you cannot trust your mother, you won’t know how to love her, and you are trying so hard to let love in.
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Where We Stay by Suzanne Manizza Roszak
One night I dreamed that my mother was pulling favors for me in a version of the afterlife that seemed more carnivalesque than majestic. There were arcade games and she was playing them on my behalf, racking up points and prizes to barter for my survival in a world of lost, dissolving girls and insistent, concrete things.
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Hypoxic Euphoria by Ellee Achten
I watched sound escape me in wobbling circles of air, my body moving farther from my voice and from the surface where my calls popped without being heard.
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Two Poems by Anne Barngrover
Gaze upon my glowing dress, / ever spooled and spiraled. Trail my creeping rootstock / back to where I first learned the definition of grace / and how it always seemed like blackmail.
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The Runaway Restaurant by Tessa Yang
I pictured a tiny window opening in my sternum: out whooshed all my fears like a cloud of bats. I really believed I could do this. I could bring our daughter home.
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Black. Wild. Laughing. Revisiting Danez Smith’s Homie and Reading at Fresno State by Angel Gonzales
Smith is writing from the margins, not about them, centering on all the things that are often denied, like love, tenderness, pain, friendship, and most importantly, joy. But there is no way around it, as Smith says when speaking about their process for self-care after writing about Black trauma.
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A Mother is Not a Zero-Sum Game by Elaine van der Geld
Before I became one, I’d never been interested in mothers. Those lumpen creatures with sagging faces, boxy, careless clothes, bad hair, beholden to a small dictator. Certainly, I’d never become one.
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Naming by Katie Miller
But is there something to be said, too, for the maybe? For the way a maybe snakes into a sentence, into a paragraph, into a narrative into a life, leaving holes where certainty could’ve been?
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Leaning into the End of the World by Matthew Hawkins
The punishment at the commune for having relations that weren’t explicably geared toward procreation was exile. The risk made it even better.
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The Limiting Value of Trauma by Annie Erlyn
The trigger in my mind ticks like a small time-bomb, cratering my concentration with holes.
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Voicemail by Caroline Chavatel
I gargle salt every night, spit on my paper cuts & watch them ooze.
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What Grew From The Earth by Lorinda Toledo
Girls, she knew, did what they could for each other. Boys, though. They grew into men.
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Now and Then by Steve Mueske
we salted our hearts / with a stubborn faith, being young
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For Dorothy, Who Made It By Sara Brody
In this novel, which I would never ask you to read, which once you used to prop open the window during the heatwave in December that gave us cause for dread, there are three brothers. Can I talk about it, just a little?
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A Normal Interview with Chelsea Biondolillo by Brock Allen
Amassing research and playing with it and seeing what it might turn into is very much a practice I enjoy. I would do that even if I didn't write essays. The last year of not writing any essays is a testament to that.
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Ode to My Belly by Jeremy Radin
You deserve it, / carrying, as you do, a nation, carrying, as you do, / the memories of a people / & what they longed for.
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Torches Lighting the Way: An Interview with Juan Felipe Herrera By Michael Torres and Christopher Buckley
Fresno has opened for me like a Lotus flower. I say thank you to this city.
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Growing Pains by M. M. Kaufman
Then I met this guy—and he was really very good at parties. Maybe that’s when I should have run.
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Stasis by Ryan Bloom
The sweet scent of basil, the sharp bite of rosemary, in all the years since Tristan Mallory last breathed them in, they remained as vibrant and alive as ever, even here, light years from Earth, in an Observation Chamber floating in outer space.
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We Shot and Shot by Hannah Harlee
I don’t want you to come away from here inspired.
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