genre: Poetry
A Guide for Being a Matriarch Fit for a Museum
By Emari DiGiorgio
This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.
In Memoriam: The Victims of the Bowling Green Massacre
By BJ Ward
This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.
The Blue Mimes / Los mimos azules
By Sara Daniele Rivera
4 de julio: costa verde We turn the corner and I see her doubled over the seaside bench in taut, iridescent blue. Every movement, slight: fingers skim the ankle, head angles up, shoulders roll down. Her partner approaches from behind, teardrops half-painted beneath his eyes. When he walks he walks stilted, a rhythm: green coast.… Read more »
at the department of social services
By Celeste Schantz
We sit in the failure factories; we, the apparition of working mothers clutching our utility shut-off notices. This form says provide proof of your destitution, please summarize your poverty please add emotional abuses in these two lines please multiply by the darkness of the members of your household; keep your faces down, fill out the… Read more »
The Holy of Holies Man
By Isaac Black
“An obeah-man never dies, sir — the Devil looks after him.” –Eden Phillpotts for A.R., Harlem, 1985 Somehow, you knew you were naked, in trouble. Something was wrong, because you didn’t feel sacred but tired. Knowing that brain neutrons were going hay-wire wasn’t fun. After the herbal sponge bath, you’d stand in the tub… Read more »
Dysphoria Id Est
By Emily Florence Morley
Back when you were a boy, you were Matt. Now? You say: Call me Matt(ie), or Matt—which is to say, paint your nails scarlet as much as you desire, though she who carries Adam’s apple presents Original Sin to the world. Translation: there’s a serpent in your garden, & yes, that’s euphemism (& yes, that’s… Read more »
Mommy Loves You. But I Am Not Emmett Till,
and We’ve Never Been to Mississippi
By Isaac Black
Every day I hear you. Your whispers or sighs follow me like a lattice of shadows. I guess I’m between here and there ’cause it’s been Stormy Weather since 1955 and Emmett Till. Some in the family say they saw you in an old movie clip, and you collapsed over the casket. Years later you
By Eileen Cleary
Not his ride-on pony, but its print on the grass. ( ) Galloping white space gathering its fields. Nicker whisper. Thunder burn. ( ) Once at Angelo’s grocery, I reached for a small boy. ( ) We thought, perhaps Rhode Island. Or a border town nearby. ( ) The stars on his face haven’t mapped… Read more »
By Ricki Cummings
it’s something we hadn’t really thought about until she mentioned it: where i end and you begin, this permeable layer we’d assumed was a good thing how we intermingled commingled (this is a reference not just to fluids and bodies but brainwaves) (like shaky electrons and electronics through the conservatory air) how can this… Read more »
By Amy Lerman
For Maria Luisa Over coffee, my friend tells me how he drove to Juarez with his mother’s dresses, his father wanting only one as a remembrance. When he’d piled them into the truck bed, he found himself zippering a sleeveless checkered jumper, a clichéd movie gesture he couldn’t stop right away. His father told him… Read more »
On My Two-Year-Old Brother Gone Missing
Aleatoric Sequence
On His Way To See A Man
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