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

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

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

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.

Spring means I have to go outside again
and pretend to like it, put on the yoke
of growth for growth’s sake, socialize in the
hard sun, eat with bees, shave and paint my toes.
The tyranny of good weather is here:

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.

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.

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.

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

back and forth
in an open car door

The first customers to enter the door into Geraldine’s newly opened shop, Spiritus Mundi, were skeletons.

Not people in skeleton costumes.

At the end of “Barbie,” different models through time flash on the movie screen alongside the credits. It was then that I remembered I own a Barbie.

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

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

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.”

A deeply honest account of a fractured relationship in Featherville.

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

One, I imagine she’s in the throes of
writing her first graphic novel, this young
woman, a remarkable piece entitled New Tales

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.

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

In the trees outside her second-story home office, birds chatter manically, the way they seem to on only spring mornings. Somewhere along the street, a neighbor’s dog is caught in a cycle of howling, a plaintive, almost desperate sound, as if in a state of pain or alarm.

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.

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

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

one.

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

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.

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.

I witnessed a livestreamed genocide, 

From the brick in my hand.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Dear Ethel,

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.  

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

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.

When you carry a ghost
long enough, you make
a home for him
in your marrow.

That day in the neighbor’s front yard it was so hot
everyone stripped shirtless, in cutoffs, shorts, knees

Bunion turned
Habit step
As men
Step vainly into men

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-for Jennifer Martelli

Even the morning word games mourn you.

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

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

About a well-meaning but fumbling anti-poverty non-profit in Bangkok

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. 

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

painting over any man, even new love.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Reckoning (n): a count, computation, calculation

You’re back, Halina says, not looking me in the eye, and leaves me
bitter black cherries on the table. As a child, I believed these
cherries to be food for rooks, because even sparrows wouldn’t eat
such bitter fruits. Only the rooks and sometimes me. The culture

There’s a storm gathering in my attic:
Pokémon cards, old novels, broken lamps
and art projects, paint chips flaking to the floor,
that picture of my younger self that haunts me.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

No one’s clear on how to live with wanting.
The dog snatches gloves from the table

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.”

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.

Outside, spring had finally arrived. The sun flooded my room as I sat at my table, staring at the man on my computer screen. I wasn’t up for it—10 am Saturday sessions. But it wasn’t a case of being up for it or not. It’s something I needed to do. I didn’t want to be outside anyway, where my skin sticks out from a mile away.

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

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.

In the early days of that frigid winter, Whitt spent half his time staring out the kitchen window. His beloved guitar leaned unplucked and gathering dust against a wall.