Poetry from A.R. Robins
Photo by Hamish Secrett On Birds and Bees The beak, russet lance, awkward enters the yawning throat releases the worm. No love, just old instinct that dictates two bodies. The stinger, thin dart, heedless pushes the sunburned epidermis injects the venom. No sense of duty, no real war. Nothing to count or add together. A […]
Fiction from Kerry Graham
Photo by Nil Castellví Dare You dared me: climb in your window. I thought, after childhood, dares died. But later, remembering how I straddled your windowsill, I wondered—was this to prove to you I would, could, do it? Or. Was this proof to me? About how badly I want to be where you are. . […]
Fiction from Emily Dezurick-Badran
Photo by Patrick Schöpflin Lateness It isn’t as people think—that we, the chronically late, have no comprehension of time. In fact the opposite is true. We understand time best because we know it as manifold. Rushing through London towards an appointment with the trauma specialist we know we’ll arrive on time only so long as […]
Poetry from Baba Badji
MULTINATIONAL SELF Imagine shutting myself in the American face, where I face the low slung & pale sky where Africanness send Negroness down the elephant’s shadow of Négritude. The will to smile that big Senegalese smile- Un Homme blanc me dépose au regard de L’Océan Atlantique, au regard des terres Africaines Because I refuse to […]
Poetry from Kate DeBolt
Editor’s Note: The following ekphrastic poems are responses to artist Barton Lidice Beneš’ “Lethal Weapons” series—specifically, the pieces “Silencer” (1993) and “Molotov Cocktail” (1995)—in which the artist filled various vessels with his own HIV-positive blood. To see each poem’s corresponding artwork, click on its title. . . Silencer i wouldn’t really kill you but if i did […]
Fiction from Jennifer Fliss
Towels . The baby is born at home. This isn’t planned. In a blizzard in Wisconsin, she slips out of her mother and is wrapped, a slush of vernix and blood; a blue child in a crisp white towel. . We are going to the beach. We carry sunblock and water and snacks. The kids […]
Three Cross-Genre Pieces from Jessy Randall and Briget Heidmous
Editor’s Note: The following are from the Mapping Project, a collaborative work by Jessy Randall and Briget Heidmous which includes images with text, texts made of images, animated gifs, and more. We’re delighted to share these selections. . . Message in a Bottle — Enough — Fair to Say . . Jessy Randall, 47, has had […]
Two Poems from E. Kristin Anderson
Subaudible Please, not poison— small, trashy, the hanging leaves mother knew, these toy hundreds floating yellow school buses, the party in the destination, windows opened out. If you hear— shadows joined hands and tumbled down breathing, out all night, out all night, panic […]
Fiction from Josh Patrick Sheridan
Chicago, 1987 According to the schedule, the train will be coming in two minutes. There will be lots of people on board—a Saudi exile, a former welterweight boxer, a family of twelve with tickets to the aquarium’s new PenguinTown show. Women and men will be holding hands, their noses nestled into each other’s fur-lined corduroy, […]
Fiction from Suzanne Verrall
stones There was a woman who loved her children so much she ate stones to fend off hunger while feeding them what wizened roots and tubers she could forage. She visited neighbours, begging for mean scraps to keep her family whole. The neighbours gave what they could, sometimes denying their own chickens or pigs, so […]
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