Furious Stampede Take the knife half mango half blade i die in the dichotomy and the divide bring your ear to […]
Invocación: Poems
call and response
by Chiagoziem Jideofor
call and response every time you bring me to the point of questioning, i bend o immaculate queen of streetlamps and audit benches leafing through layers of what is presumed and claimed i do not like feeling this naked or looked over with strange eyes there is hesitation on my part. […]
Reprint
by Stacy Boe Miller
Reprint When I saw his wife’s milk-pond skin I scrubbed my face until it bled. Wrinkles hold my mouth in parenthesis. I’d like to be less rusted barbed wire and more fresh spring pond. You are the strongest person I know Sam said but when I […]
Judith and Her Maidservant
by Virginia Laurie
Judith and Her Maidservant I’m scared that my hair is falling out because I’m a gossip; scared hissing follicles loose with loose cruel lips; I believe in punishment as much as forgiveness; I believe bound fingers form blades; Artemisia paints Lucretia with the dagger pointed up and away; I see myself gripping liquored stringy hair; […]
The Body Expendable
by Clement Obropta
Thirty years from now, humans will be colonizing far-off planets. Legally dubious clones called expendables will be used for deadly grunt work. And everything else will be, unfortunately, very much the same. Such is the vision of the future in Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi gonzo adventure Mickey 17, starring Robert Pattison as one of those expendables […]
Our Mansfield Girl
by Matt Ferraz
Six Ziegfeld girls in their teens were in the theater dressing room that night in 1916: Olive Thomas, Lilyan Tashman, Fifi Alsop, Bessie Poole, Kathryn Lambert, and Martha Mansfield. An old woman walked into the girls’ dressing room to sell them cosmetics. As they talked, she told them she used to be exquisite too, one […]
MAMA WANTS HER BABY BACK: DUPLEX and If/Then/Ophidian
by Dominic Anthony
MAMA WANTS HER BABY BACK: DUPLEX Mama wants her baby back. Baby does not know how to be wanted. Baby knows how to want. Mama does not know how to have. Mama does know how to be wanted. Men want Mama and Baby. Men want Mama and Baby in the same way. Baby does […]
Three Poems
by Margarita Losada Vargas, Translated from the Spanish by Maddie Kwasnick
PIETÀ i am asking permission to die a little to tear your membrane to expel you from my uterus you will never suffer the weight of light nor the wounds of a scream you will be my most beloved exile you will be the air that nourishes my garden of […]
The Mother Part
by Siamak Vossoughi
The Mother Part At the Free Palestine march, Anil saw the sign first: If you are anything like my mother, Agnes Kimber, who says that Palestinians are animals, then you are my enemy too. We couldn’t see who was holding it. They were up at the front. They wanted everyone to know. “How about […]
Death of the Sea Urchins: Poems
by Nihat Ozdal, Translated from the Turkish by Jeffrey Kahrs and Mete Özel
Twentieth Button I made buttons out of salt particles rippling across the ocean’s evening. Minerals and dried plant were extracted, remnants of volcanoes and forest fires, smoke and acid, neutrons produced by fission, prayers for the easiest way to make rain. You asked me to explain the second process within this clutter I’ve made: often, […]
