BEST OF THE NET 2023; Essay in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2018;
(cited in BAE 2015, 2016, 2020, 2022); PUSHCART poetry finalist
By Saida Agostini
on sundays my mother would sigh sit me down between her firm brown legs unfurl my braids a forest of jet black tangled roots and roses her slight cool fingers pruning slick with grease the mist of water like a bruise to an ache hours later I’d rise graceless, still a child from her… Read more »
By Jon D. Lee
—part I of The Labyrinth Come see what we have wrought How blindness veils as if a shouldered hand affirming love The darkling comfort of a well-trod path that eases through the open door and down the hallway to the bookshelf strained with rows of foreign mountaintops and children’s heads in glossy frames … Read more »
By Anya Kirshbaum
When one great love was done, finished, I wanted to know the bees. So I painted beehives the color of blushing dahlias and worked the secret earth room of my body down into them, each tired muscle, each sad hip—a bottomless longing pulse from my limbs. In my ears a song loop—not a mother, not… Read more »
By Deaundra Jackson
I watch the blood of dawn spread wildfire blade wondering what the last Sun of home was that my ancestors saw Me, in the hold of a plane breaching the West African coast the plane wings read No step No step if steel wings require no treading upon a poem is where you return when… Read more »
By John Macker
“You are there, almost, without a name, without a body, go now.” ⸺Juan Felipe Herrera 1. Pass the exhausted prayer flags after a day of fiendish wind and no grace. 2. Find true north on your compass and locate the crossroads where I’ve shredded the most debilitating of my regrets. 3. If you’re… Read more »
By Jendi Reiter
Loudly, at the League of Women Voters book sale, my sixth-grade son asks me “Have you ever wanted to commit suicide?” His four moods are silly, angry, hungry, and asleep. A battered copy of the DC Comics series lies between Donald Duck and a graphic memoir of Palestine on the genre-sorted table in the vocational… Read more »
By Josette Akresh-Gonzales
a woman in a winter hat lifts the fallboard dusts the grit off the keys and begins to play Chopin on the white grand piano a window shattered a wall torn and strewn on the floor around the woman in her winter jacket playing Chopin on the dirty piano to think this woman survived the… Read more »
By Xiaoly Li
The snake’s scales gleam yellow and black. He’s engulfing the bulgy eyed frog, whose throat and chest heave raw. The frog contracts with each gulp, gasping for air. My heart shamed, I remember night-caught frogs cooked delicious and spicy by my kindergarten teachers. I favor the frog now. His croak is music. His song fills twilight’s… Read more »
By Frannie Lindsay
Take a porch with a girl on it playing the cello, some weeds that need to be yanked up next to the Japanese maple. Maybe she has a crush on her landlord, sexy in spite of the nervous tic that scares people off. In August the heat can get wicked, the sidewalk littered with empty… Read more »
By Meg Yardley
When we got out of bed, all four corners of the fitted sheet had pulled off and curled in toward the center, exposing sallow sweat stains, cat claw pockmarks. Sagging pillows, propped at the wall, leaned sideways, partisan: one to the left with all the air squeezed out, one to the right, pillowcase half-peeled back,… Read more »
By Khalil Sima’an
Like waves on the mediterranean your little shrieks roll ahead of your feet, watched over by foreign pine trees, and when you chase them, like doves they take off to the blue skies of my father’s youth. Your little eyes and ears clamber up my story line; fascination sits on your eyebrows like a wild… Read more »
By Betsy Sholl
As to the oboe it doesn’t need teeth, but a boot heel can’t play it, he tries to tell the guard, and feels for how many teeth he has left. How will it help him to think his instrument’s older than Zyklon B, older than his neighbor soiling herself as she tumbled down the steps,… Read more »
By Cecille Marcato
Glowing like a bride she glides as though mounted on a parade float, drawing all eyes to her: a bright blue topaz in miles of poufed organza scooped up to avoid a brush with McDonald’s floor, the jambs & kickplates, where dirty boots have shuffled & food scraps lie in ambush knowing that on this… Read more »
By Juan Pablo Mobili
Abandoned buildings had ancestors that went up in flames. Gone are the cities founded by a wolf and her two twins, and the home made out of twigs was blown away by a wolf’s twin lungs, like dandelion seeds. Buildings have nothing to reminisce about but the whistling of bricklayers, way before they were stuffed… Read more »
By Hunt Hawkins
A strange, soft creature rests tethered in my mouth, gentle aesthete, wet and bumpy, discerning shades of salt, sweet, bitter, sour beyond any practical necessity, understandably alarmed by the occasional taco de lengua, more so by the sharp incisors sharing its space, but still making its modest contribution to speech, not sibilants or fricatives, of… Read more »
By Charles O. Hartman
Not to go to bed but to stay the night there, we have to work out who gets which. Whose habit’s stronger decides, except in the happy case where bents agree. This is universal. Yet we have no common language for which is which. North or East won’t do, nearer the bathroom and beside the… Read more »
By Brian Builta
I’ve been crawling out of darkness for years, one concerto at a time, prone to unraveling but continuing to climb. I was told to get tough quick, but that hardening only made the darkness deeper, so out of the cicada shell I squoze, shabby spirit amorphous yet intact. I have a hunch of going to… Read more »
By Joy Arbor
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Meghan McClure
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Kiara Nicole Letcher
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Taylor Mckinnon
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By C.Jean Blain
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Eliot Cardinaux
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Daragh Hoey
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Amy K. Genova
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Jess Skyleson
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Nikki Ummel
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Marjorie Power
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Camille Carter
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Greg Djanikian
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Lauren Camp
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Lauren Camp
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Robbie Gamble
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Matthew E. Henry (MEH)
no. he weren’t no kin of mine. not my pa or grandpa. no grey-headed uncle neither. just some drifter mister Henry paid to be painted, same as me. but he was told to really teach me how to pluck and strum—told it made it “more authentic.” so I set there listenin’ to one mumble ‘bout… Read more »
By Quintin Collins
after Enzo Silon Surin Some mother said to always wear a clean pair of underwear in case of emergencies in which EMTs need cut off your pants, and some other mother said dress like every outfit is your last as if the funeral walks in lockstep. I iron wrinkles from my jeans, shirts, and chinos.… Read more »
By Liz Abrams-Morley
This morning you’re thinking about shoes, of a painting your sister is trying to complete, socked feet of all those young men, her son’s friends come to make a shiva call, to visit a mother in shock, grieving, boys removing sneakers so as to not soil her carpet. Fifteen years later, she paints what she… Read more »
By Rachel M. Dillon
or clatter them into the sink, I think of John Muir, suddenly blind by an awl snapped upward, piercing his eye. What remained? A hunger for holiness, like when I realize everything outside was made by someone’s hands—even the rats, boundless and loud, fat on trash. All of it, I fold into the suitcase of… Read more »
By Bonita Lee Penn
-after So What, by Miles Davis complex kind of blue man in a silent way kind of complicated man who birth coolness miles ahead his sounds this kind of mellowness his groove flawed and loved and feared even though his nothing or all stance towards women the drugs and all that within a world of… Read more »
By Robert Carr
after Octavio Paz Spring snows pink lips and you, beloved plot of dirt, take me to your lily-of-the-valley bed, rest my head on rising falls of flesh-drift and mudslide. I reach for your fumbling finger, you fill my gut with pebbles, roots. Lift me from your lowland, count half-children oozing from this body in the… Read more »
By Sara Dudo
I To erect a greenhouse on a perennial farm: 1, 2, 3 group push of metal arches up to heirloom sun dipping underneath each metal line along the other side rays peppering the eye we mourn spring eternal cycle: fingertips sweat along hot metal each ladder step a tinny hymn, echoing edict of screw… Read more »
By Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick
I was told there’s a fairy tale where all the daughters heal their own wounds by completing their assignment before midnight. Every Wednesday, the daughters set fire to the village & everyone agrees the daughters should burn as the summer & just as welcome. Look! The warmth the daughters bring, an offering. I was told… Read more »
By Mary Ann Honaker
She’s in her own little world, says one man to the other, as I walk by their front porch where they sit and drink beer with the front door wide open. Actually, I’m harvesting encounters: tiger lilies planted by a driveway, a bursting snowball bush, the curious way one tree’s branch turned ninety degrees to… Read more »
By Martha McCollough
in the dark museum taking the form of a little dragon burnt black, square-headed, crouching doggish at the angel’s feet the devil is so ugly-cute you want to take him home give him a cushion a little plaid blanket don’t you always make that mistake— what looked harmless enters the house begins to swell and… Read more »
By Samuel "Sami" Miranda
The jibaro builds his home on a mountainside the flamboyan adds its red to the view. The spaces between the slats allow the music of the pitirre’s call to enter the home and adds to the quiquiriqui of the rooster that struts his ownership of morning. The jibaro walks the mountain sees that it is
By Valerie Smith
the sunflower aches her long neck under duress of a blue roof’s eave her seed draws evening’s edge thin lines of black and white pinstripe yearn for unity. wine poured out burns closer to the stem’s sacrifice. roots, unmentionable. deep seeking. whole as the hovered sea carried in. currents pull color in bright directions. cool… Read more »
By Amanda Rabaduex
This is a desert scene. Imagine the cactus fever green hunger strewn across sands but we are driving 80 so Sonoran streams out the window. Morning moon shining white atop blue. Let’s call it cerulean. Imagine the eagles echo over fricative land. This is no Blood Meridian, this is a road trip pastoral where the… Read more »
By Shauna M. Morgan
Sweet Samba Bellies touch in a full orbit, a navel and hip belt a Congo sphere a corner circle a Kikongo Semba, masemba from coast to coast and we move like two eager ocean waves lapping at each other conjuring up our old and new from Soyo to Bahia and ours is not… Read more »
By Lauren WB Vermette
After the Overturn of Roe v. Wade, June 24th, 2022 New York Harbor has shoved itself inside me. Swallowed Emma Lazarus’ bronze words in reverse: I lift my lamp beside the golden door!… ..The wretched refuse of your teeming shore… …glows world-wide welcome, her mild eyes command… …Mother of exiles, from her beacon hand… Tourists… Read more »
By Meghan Sterling
with his metal legs of the walker and skin hanging like ears, his breasts like ears, what if he had his body back the body he knew in his youth shooting hoops what if he had the body that made me in the back of the Volkswagen bus in a parking lot in Oregon or… Read more »
By Tramaine Suubi
on this 10th anniversary of your grandmothers’ deaths pack a suitcase, buy a one-way ticket to the motherland to the first place you called home leave the airport, pass the city, drive into the dusk open the door to the bungalow, breathe in the dust sit on the narrow bed, tenderly lay out your dresses… Read more »
Desire
Agape
Sweet Samba
I Dream I Am The Statue Of Liberty
What If My Father Not My Father
swan songs
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