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 […]
Poetry
MAMA WANTS HER BABY BACK: DUPLEX and If/Then/Ophidian
for my ill brown daughter
by Ela Kini
for my ill brown daughter thap. thap. thap. hey there fever girl. hey there ’s water running down your chest, wind slapping your window, hey there fever girl, I hear you keep your eyes in a brown paper […]
Review: Virginia Bell’s Lifting Child from the Ground, Turning Around
by Brian Satrom
There’s a moment in Virginia Bell’s poem “The Invention of Walking” where the speaker’s son shares with her his observations of how humans walk: “…some like windows opening out // or in, some like puppets dangling— / he imitates to show me, then he imitates // me, my Neanderthal arms swinging” (p. 39). It’s an […]
The Flea
by Jessica Q. Stark
THE FLEA is a lyrical and critical meditation, using the flea as a parasite and marketplace to morph into a monstrous, grieving artifact. We enter an intimate yet exhilarating site for examining consumption and digital accumulation, where Vietnamese histories and diasporic fugitivity interweave with the detritus of late capitalism.
Persephone watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer
by Lauren Eggert-Crowe
Persephone watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer I, too, have known the dark chocolate thrill of a kiss against the wall of a mausoleum. Our hunger pangs caused us trouble — the semiotics of leather jackets, animal prints. Night smudges the lines, sexual and otherwise. I know how lonely it is to grow beside a lover […]
Our Sodden Bond
by Kelly Gray
OUR SODDEN BOND manifests narratives with a spiritual pulse from survival and play as liberation.
Tilda and I Are Cast in a Play, and it’s Called Ode to a Murmuration of Starlings, and It Dabbles in Plagiarism, but That’s To Be Expected Because This is a Dream
by Carrie Strand Tebeau
Tilda and I Are Cast in a Play, and it’s Called Ode to a Murmuration of Starlings, and It Dabbles in Plagiarism, but That’s To Be Expected Because This is a Dream Act 1 Scene 1 Inside of a dream, on an eerily familiar old high school stage with musty velvet curtains. Haven’t you been […]
Sleepwalking
by Maura Modeya
In SLEEPWALKING, the voice operates in a register of intimate defiance in the liminal space, confrontational yet matter-of-fact.
Lesson
by Charles Malone
When I ask my freshmen to read Sontag, it seems her ambiguity throws them off. Or, perhaps the precision of her questions: What is a photograph anyway and what does it do; what does it do now—now that we are feathered in them? Perhaps images are not a covering but an invasion—we are pierced with […]
Motherless Mothers and the Daughters They Bear
by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
Motherless Mothers and the Daughters They Bear I mother myself gentle because my mother’s hands were rough, cracked, and ruby ringed. When her mother died, she kept all the jewelry and left me nothing. Maybe when your mother never mothers you, it makes you a hoarder. Mother’s Day commemorative plates from the 70s to the […]
