Explore Diverse Voices

A serious injury and a surreal journey through the medical circus that ensues.

The first time I clapped eyes on Echo Wolfeson she was playing a kangaroo.

New in town, I’d gone to meet the coaches. In Jackson, the sport was politicized. More oligarchy than meritocracy. I went into the Field House prepared to make my case. Show film. Stats. I had it all ready.

Exploring the themes of family secrets, loss, and the things that remain unspoken in immigrant communities.

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.

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

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

-for Jennifer Martelli

Even the morning word games mourn you.

The man’s grey eyes, no light in them. The tug on the corners of his mouth rendering a smile impossible. Lucy had seen a look like that before.

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

The silences yearn and the sun falls.
The first, great dark cleaves
the brown humps of a valley
that reposes. A shattered moon hangs

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.

My heart aches, and the same drowsy song begins
Ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum. Tree empties itself
into my beak. Tells me how people turn

For this journey, forget practical things.
Begin with touch and smell, silk and mohair
bird feathers, silver frog for joy, comb

A curious child witnesses a tragic event and contends with the question, why would someone take their own life?

The intersection of Proctor, Boston, and Bridge Streets in Salem, Massachusetts is drab. A Dunkin Donuts spreads its pink and beige cheer; there’s an empty fenced-in lot with a coating of rubble, a three-family brick building, and a Walgreens, fringed with a parking lot. It’s an area no one has bothered to spruce up; the businesses will do their business regardless.

Reckoning (n): a count, computation, calculation

They grasp the edges of the off-white parachute
in 1st-grade gym class, soles of their sneakers
peeling off, nursery rhymes rendered mute
like a poisoned pond emptied of frogs’ croaks.

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

A day before the long drive to Northampton, where I would join friends in a book talk about war and language, I arrived at a small town emergency room, signed in, took a seat, and for the next half hour mulled over what had led me there.

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

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

Briefly, while I watch Lion King with my son
for the billionth time until I finally snap
it off. Enough.

The recent inferno at Louisiana’s Nottoway Plantation has unleashed a firestorm (no pun intended) of controversy. Memes abound on social media where Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and ghosts of the formerly enslaved watch the fire burn in vindicated satisfaction.

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

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

collapsed star,
two am Navajo darkness and
waves of string-theory echo
blue sage branches,
canyon red arroyo – glitter pollen dust

(Elba Songs)

In Chiessi, the fish came from the sea in the morning

after the Costa del Sole sunsets,

where one makes love overhanging the Tyrrhenian Sea,

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

O, Gentle Reader,
lend me your noble ear. 
They call me Jean-Pierre.
I live in Vatovavy, a fiefdom
of charm & bliss.

We talk about other things, but not class
in class. I think in class we don’t talk
about class because the university has

You know Banesa Delgado walks home with you cuz she hungry—right? I mean, you the fattest freshman in North Bergen High. You think the baddest bitch in the volleyball team—and that’s a lot to say, cuz alladem bad—wanna be seen nowhere with you?

In the title poem of her remarkable new poetry collection, A Black Doe in the Anthropocene, Artress Bethany White recounts a tense encounter with an armed landowner as she is exploring the pine woods around the North Carolina plantation site where her ancestors had once been enslaved.

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.

You, standing on the disputed land.
Over there, with your ear to the sky.

What do you pray for when you go to bed at night?
Does the old muse of belonging visit you too, whispering?
Painting the promise of what could be behind your shut eyes, not yet asleep?

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

Weather flew across the field. Over the horizon the land tacked to a cloud. The field continued into night a far town lit.

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.

they told me to pray for him,
for his success. that doing otherwise
was like rooting against the pilot
while sitting on the plane—

I first heard about you in a library board meeting. A homeless guy had been playing video games on the library computer. The director, a young guy with a red beard and close-set eyes, said that he made one of the employees uncomfortable.

In his essay “Arendt in New York,” in our Winter 2017 issue, selected for inclusion in Best American Essays, Baron Wormser wrote “She has witnessed rant that silenced every reproof. She has waited for some larger affirmation to arise, the vision of decency, but none came.”

Ionian, from the dark depths emerged the waters
from the hoarse and mighty voice of the underground
was generated the blind furrow of the Mediterranean.
Volcanoes and shadows took shape, and the sea

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.

Bunion turned
Habit step
As men
Step vainly into men

Quiet now.
The flag-shredding wind
has passed. Door left open,
you are gone.

My mother used to say that lobsters scream when boiled, but it’s only air escaping the shell. I was seven when she first told me this, standing at her station in Cannery Building C, watching her feed crawlers into the steamer.

Today, these tears are tulips, gnashing ego petals
lured gold, all raining around brown eyes.

Also, but I am weaker
than you, because you were enslaved.

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

– Dying is this losing weight in a loop –
all the lemmas we’re fond of
left to decompose in an unfamiliar tongue
of worms and mud, the fragile stem
of body, crossed by a tremor
of fireflies, the gaze folded back on itself.

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.

there is a lone man on the cusp
on a wide-open palm of stone quarried
where the pressure of plural millennia of magma
and wind, after, where once was sea, 
have left uplands of igneous isles to traverse

In Poland, a daughter reflects on the complexities of love and addiction through the lens of a cherished family tradition.

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

I was teaching seventh-grade Humanities in New York City when the first plane hit. 

“the Lourdes of America”

you look for a back-channel negotiation,
but no plea is offered only the pretense
you would accept a lesser sentence, time

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

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

I witnessed a livestreamed genocide, 

From the brick in my hand.

About a middle-aged woman’s lifelong struggle with body issues in the guise of a real estate listing.

Your husband and you lean over the edge, rooftop parking. Both of you panting, him holding his side. Bags from holiday shopping strewn near your feet. You watch four men meet in the center of the street below as if each of them advanced from designated corners of a boxing ring.

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.

back and forth
in an open car door