Explore Diverse Voices

First an earthy earth,
then another—no, the very same
suddenly unearthly.

How delicious and fragile we humans look,
pacing the diving platform in a bikini
or board shorts, arms and legs

Margot never liked her name, which was unfortunate because she was sitting in a doctor’s office waiting to hear it. Margot.

In the beginning, they were like goldfish, barely visible as they floated beneath the surface of the tepid bathwater. It was Sunday in England, the day we had a bath.

2025 marks fifty years since the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War. Half a century later, Lebanon still suffers its consequences. In recent years, conditions have deteriorated quickly, especially after a total economic meltdown, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Beirut Port Explosion on August 4, 2020, and yet other wars in 2024 and 2026.

The sun is off
In prayer
In breath abide
Words’ apogee

My first psychedelic trip was at a hospital in West Haven, Connecticut, a few miles from Yale University. My husband and cousin were eating pizza in downtown New Haven, while I was hooked up to a saline IV drip, a wet washcloth draped on the back of my neck, watching the show Friends. Everything was luminous while simultaneously mundane. 

mixing with the trees’ exhalations, it’s why that cool
permeates the air under trees at twilight.
But sometimes a house just sits there, impervious

The 12 images seen here represent three different series made across decades.

To whom it may concern,

It is my pleasure to recommend Zygote Jane Doe (ZyJane) as the eventual fetus of Eileen. After five pregnancies, her uterus will easily hold this underweight infant whose expected moxie and inherent tenacity will no doubt sustain the amounts of tobacco and alcohol this womb will likely absorb.

He sits in front of a wall of glass, and his glass, which was made of plastic, was already empty.

You wake up one morning alone at 70, your wife of 30 years newly dead from lung cancer, having promised at the start of your relationship to stop smoking and then deceived you all those years.  How was it that you didn’t smell it on her?  Didn’t find the cigarettes? 

When I was a junior in college, a friend handed me a copy of When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams. We’d been intimate with each other’s obsessions and sleep schedules, sharing a bed to save money, hardly ever using it at the same time.

The unforeseen arrived on an autumn day some twenty years ago in Canberra, Australia. I had been living there for fifteen years, having immigrated from the U.S. to spend my life with a man I had met on a train in

Christine Lavant in “Earth if you had two lips” speaks passionately to Earth in a voice that may well speak for humanity in our time, believing we are friends but also fearing that we are destroying ourselves by the lies we tell ourselves concerning the way we treat it.

Michał Sobol is an awarded Polish poet whose poetics is marked by restrain and condensation, at the same time displaying existential tension. Sobol transfigures ordinary experiences into philosophical, political, or historical moments of unease or disquietude.

Between the decaying doublewide
and the beast maw
of development lies
this last remnant of soil like home,
grey-edged and drying against
the encroaching green, a fermenting
pumpkin patch caught
in permanent dusklight

The second time I heard him play, he sat
facing his windows overlooking the river.

I said to my kids, “Trust me, you don’t want to know. You’ll wish you could go back to not knowing, but by then it’ll be too late.”

New Hampshire has the largest Irish American population of any U.S. state. Irish Americans are a perennially aggrieved and mediocre people; they love to drink, and they gravitate toward New Hampshire, perhaps partially because the state motto, “live free or die,” appeals to their sense of responsibility.

This is evidence, like fingermarks crimping upper arms,
like the bruise on the cheek bearing the shape of his ring,
the zigzag grooved in the X-rays.

etween tricks I play on myself to fall asleep
I imagine what it’d be like to spend a whole day
in bed, not with dread like right now as I pray
for rest before a morning alarm like napalm

I leaf through an old world atlas my grandmother gave me when I was thirteen. Published in 1942, the red-brown cover is thick and hard, protecting a hefty five hundred pages. I’m intrigued by the countries whose boundaries have since relocated and the nations that no longer exist. In the eighty-plus years since the maps were compiled, islands have appeared and disappeared, mountains have changed shape, lakes have formed and dissolved. Through this, I understand that a map captures only one moment in time.

I begin to pray for the world. Believe me
it’s involuntary—a lamp chain’s pulled,
my bulb filament glows….

Reckoning (n): a count, computation, calculation

A total eclipse of the sun illuminates the order of the cosmos.

Mephistopheles and Faustus had been eating roast duck
With pancakes and scallions in a Chinese restaurant
In Midtown, and after dinner, they’d gone for a walk

It wasn’t that the eagle didn’t love you,
that his plumage wasn’t cut like a paper
snowflake is cut, repeating itself like a heart
is cut, or repeats itself—No.

streams of dust behind the town. dust
and cornfields as if it were the crash site
of a space probe which had disgorged violet
figures, shields, old car seats lying in the grass.

Blay, Yaba. “How the ‘One Drop Rule’ Became a Tool of White Supremacy.” LitHub, 22 Feb. 2001.1 CBC Radio. “Black Teen Shot in the Head After Knocking on the Wrong Door Doing ‘Exceptionally

a woman was carrying a bundle,
in the bundle were dead children
and a wooden head, a memento.
a wooden bell. at times what you need to know about a dream

Artist Statement: I believe the portrait can disclose more about the subject than what is found on the surface. The subject, either willingly or subconsciously, shows us more than they intend. The camera can see more than the naked eye, moving past our persona and catching a glimpse of who we really are. With this

A deeply honest account of a fractured relationship in Featherville.

Here, flown -over spring is empty
field of just -tilled earthskin, light brown
last year’s leftover stalks, cobs, leaves,

I sank into the red sofa, too heavy to stand again. A small wooden table in front of me held a few books and my computer, connected to the TV by an HDMI cord.

For as bad as Dad got, he never drank out of cans.

Bottles, not cans. Bottles by the six-pack, then the twelve-pack. In a single weekend he’d make two trips to Burley’s, that brick cube with no windows sitting between the auto parts lot and a caved-in barn, and come home with two twelve-packs, buying only what he could carry inside in one go.

we’re splitting up quickly and quietly
to give memory nothing to feed on.
she gives me the toothpaste, the tea cups,
the liquid soap. divided. take it.
night will come. take it away.

For Japanese Americans, today, February 19, is the Day of Remembrance, when we look back to 1942 when President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066; this proclamation removed 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast and put them in concentration camps in desolate areas of the West and South.

Begin with a blank slate, a face scrubbed clean, preferably with a GRISI sulfur bar, but anything noncomedogenic will do.  If using the former, take care not to rain amber water droplets on the white lace toallitas or pink ceramic tile sink so Amá doesn’t trip.  

Mark Rothko’s vast rectangles interpose
themselves. There’s this too: pink light h

The early 1670s. Snow descends like quiet thoughts. Antonie nibbles
on sugary fresh-baked speculaas, as Johannes sips

upon an earthen cup of java, ponders the tumultuous scene buried
behind the master’s easel, throngs of rapt observers

Monument Valley was the properly mythic place for meeting this mythic event, a solar eclipse. 

back and forth
in an open car door

When I first saw Nestor, he was sitting in a wrought-iron chair in the hibiscus–filled courtyard of Havana’s Dulce María Loynaz Cultural Center.

-for Jennifer Martelli

Even the morning word games mourn you.

One sees all manner of life rock up in the waiting room of a doctor’s surgery. You have the red-faced teens with their embarrassing infections sat next to the bleary-eyed mammies comforting scabby-arsed babies.

if the tall tree died the absence
would be taller i hope the maple
lives but the tree guy says it

My dad tells us about the Hindenburg while we’re following the Goodyear blimp on our way to the dump. We’re in the back seat of the old red Saab, my brother and me, strapped into our super-duper seatbelt contraptions, the ones my dad bought at Sears, the ones that crisscross over our chests and pin us there to the cracked vinyl seats, the seats that smell of my dad’s Vantage cigarette smoke, cut with the spice of the pink Canada mints he keeps up near the emergency brake.

The toilet was lidless, its porcelain chipped and stained, squatting in the middle of what would become the kitchen of the place that somehow was going to be our family home. The year I first saw it was 1968, the Second Summer of Love, which really wasn’t about love, not in the New York of garbage strikes, the shooting of Andy Warhol, and the rioting in Morningside Park.

for i royal black sabah lil gallish gal flashed
my baby sphinx butt on may 1st weighin in
at 3 pounds up from 2.5 just
2 weeks ago ohhhh how i bozoed

A superhero origin story, his “power” the unbearable gift of knowing death’s inevitability.

The fog hasn’t rolled in this summer evening and Charu rather enjoys the warm weather during her half-hour walk from the Berkeley Downtown BART station to the Krishna temple.

someone cherished the tiny beasts,
sleek and defenseless:
the crocodile, the adder, the cat, the dog,
a couple of birds.

the year is nineteen ninety-nine
judge judy is playing
with my pre-rolls some group sings happy

When our father died, there was a group email. The five of us on one long chain, subject line: Dad’s obituary. Someone suggested I write it, on the grounds that I was the lawyer, and the one who wrote things. I did what was asked. I sketched the outline of a life—dates, jobs, the usual virtues—then sent it round for comments.

An excerpt from FREE TO BROWSE: The Internet as a Space of Survival for Trans Teens and What Happens When That Space Disappears.

When I travel I touch my passport often,
as if it was a talisman, or the foot of a rabbit

I write about dreams, mother-dreams.
She died January 21st, 2023.
I do not weep for her.
I weep for me.

one.

Bunion turned
Habit step
As men
Step vainly into men

It’s easy to forget that anything could happen, until something does. On November 11, 1979, a Sunday, I was working at my father’s horse farm on Vly Summit Road in Easton, New York, about ten miles south of Greenwich.

Incubation period I un know in
redacted lines Nav guidance touches
on hospital foster care agency
the yearning of two & three Longing

Listen up. You’re gonna take your hand. And you’re gonna reach into the bag.

TANGO]
the sound of copters rising from a distant field or if you were out
of range mistaken for wingbeats of mandarin ducks setting down

I remember I was at the end of a long twisted phone chord in a corner of my parents’ front hall when you first asked me out the summer before we went to college. You said I’d like to take you to Houlihan’s for dinner, knowing I liked the booths in the back that were shrouded by plastic vines and noisy strands of beads.

One night, we meet the boogeyman. My friends and I, arms linked, are belting a top forties hit. We are a loud and proud girl group. As we crest the hill, a man stands laughing across the street.

Ivan Dobnik’s poems are deceptively pastoral. In “Where the Forest Season Ends,” the lush and magical depiction of lighting a fire in the forest as a child becomes a metaphor for the unwitting destruction of the forest as “its shadows fall through the poem” and “the flames persist […] in the trusted wilderness of primeval space.”

You are not allowed to speak once the lights go out, and the doors are locked. No one wants to hear your songs once it’s dark, and you’ve been shut away, but you keep singing anyway. Your name is Evangeline, and you will never let it be forgotten.

Several years ago, I bought some coffee filters, and after opening the pack, I realized they were the wrong size for my Mr. Coffee, too small. I held the ripped-open package of 100 coffee filters (now 99) and faced a quandary.

Standing and praying, a man in a black yarmulke.
His body rocks, swaying back and forth,
his lips moving, murmuring. My lips,

I like life enormously—

Yes, when it’s a big dog looking to catch
my eye and lean in heavily against me
with its thick hair, its petal soft ears,
and I like life when it doesn’t behave,

Reclining on my side, face masked, I ride
in the rear seat. Raise the back of my hand
to feel if I have a fever. Yesterday, I boiled!
This girl’s body heat turned high to kill germs.

I can’t tell if the apartment really is as empty and cold as it seems, or if I’m just irreparably lonely. The man from the leasing office and I stand here together, both wishing we were elsewhere.

“It’s a decent size,” I proclaim, just to say something. I can hear the blood pooling in and out of my brain.

Self-perception, identity, and the quiet injuries we inflict upon ourselves.

Pondering fearlessness, “Sans Peur” grapples with the big things like where kittens come from, where lamb comes from, and how we must get through life both knowing and not knowing stuff.

Tonight a wind plays attentively
–mindful of that loud clashing of blades—

I’ve made it to Mass, I couldn’t find a church for three
whole weeks, but finally I’ve made it to Mass across the
fields of my idleness, mountains of narcissism, forests of
hypocrisy, a sea of German pilsner, and here I am, standing

Like some unseen blight burrowed deep in the local vines, divorce kept preying on Boundary Street. The trend seemed a stealthy contagion drawing closer and closer, its malign influence headed squarely at the Copeland’s corner lot.

On the day he died Jack DeFazio stood and waited for a number to materialize, an idea to emerge from the dark recesses of the casino, a word to become flesh above a green table. Nothing.

This morning, in tallish grass beside my car, a dirty baseball
sat like a runaway moon beside a rabbit working her athletic
jaws across the lawn with a typist’s frenzy for QWERTY

I want to be the woman flying
toward art, who prefers the surreal

painting over any man, even new love.

This hand-lettered colored pencil comic is a raw reaction to the discovery that what you thought were ‘normal’ thoughts are actually mental illness.

Dear Ethel,

I lost your ring.
It was the only thing of yours we had, other than the letters you and Julius exchanged.

I close the door to my sky blue room.
To feel you there behind it.
The sky blue room is incomplete and imperfect.

The trouble began three days ago when Tingting had stopped answering Betty’s calls, messages, then emails. For two days, before she arrived at the high school where she taught orchestra, Betty had waited outside Tingting’s pharmacy clinic.

Puzzle pieces, each from a different set, end up with gaps to fill
with mind and whatnot. From afar they’re curlicues fluent in
longing–there’s too much to say about longing we’d better leave it

A large, gold-framed portrait photograph of my maternal great-grandfather dominates one wall of the attic room where I write. With increasing frequency, I find myself musing about the similarities and differences between us.

We could go years without it ever happening, and then word would spread that we were going to get to see a movie.

I knew the price I’d pay
if I danced my soul for you.
Shined my shoes with oil
from the sunflowers we once grew.

i’m an alcoholic. a coke head. an aborter. bipolar and on a slight sedative. i’m jealous of ways other’s brilliance makes me feel small. i’m passive with peace and love. i’m distributable and often diabolical. i’m dying. i’ve died a million deaths in these last

When I make sofrito with my mother’s hands I peel the garlic and then smash its teeth like someone unfulfilled. I chop the onions into small pieces of shattered dreams and shed not a tear for what could have been.