my wife hangs winter clothing in the closet I ask myself if I am ever going to put them on again or should I say goodbye to the seasons of the year, to the parka, to the woolen sweater forever? those clothes remember the war, they’ve absorbed its horror like hair absorbs the smell of cigarettes. they’ll never forget. the…
i jabbed the straw down deeper and down into the mint and ice shavings the only ice i want to see none on the page and so hats off to that pants too sarong salutes and i did so carefully i thought who are these ice writers these canadians and their hard luck stories hard rock and but the lakes…
Shalini Singh has been published in Oberon Magazine, Berkeley Poetry Review, SUSPECT, Hobart and Hayden’s Ferry Review among others. The daughter of a mathematics teacher and an ex-lawyer herself, she is a final year MFA CWE candidate at Iowa State University where she binge feels, binge reads and binge watches stuff while grounding herself in meditative research.
[1] Bulk of the stuff underfoot Becoming the bulk of you Stuffed with its rolled green rug Churning that which turned sun into sugar A patch of clover I sat sifting through Sucking dandelion milk from its stem Milk so named for its rare opacity Bleeding from my woven crown Yellow and delicious. [2] I was reading Leaves of Grass…
One Whiskey Jag West of Amboy, two long snakes of rail stretch, coal-black, into horizon. A dusty, dead moth of a caboose, buckled over iron ore wheels. Warped, greyed— a wheeze of boards. One splintered eyebrow. One cataract eye. Your palm flattened, reaching before I can breathe the word burn, sizzling I leave you standing, fused, your wind-chapped lips cracked…
Bless the rubber band that holds night around the horizon. Bless the dry rot creeping through its tension. Bless its breaking. Bless the way the light spills out like shiny pennies from a roll. Bless the bank of days where I make my withdrawals, bless my balance in the black, bless the credit of my soul. Bless the stash of…
By Jesenia Chavez In her debut book, Hazel Kight Witham delves into middle school with a memoir in verse. She zeroes in on a fateful day where a young Witham reckons with her own fear and shame at her classmates discovering she has two moms. She loves her moms, Judie and Sharon, but middle school is an unfriendly place for…
if it meant you felt loved, i would do it. this is the sixth love language. it is a feeling, rather. it is happy and it is sad and it is neither. it is quite vermillion with a mystery that cannot be comprehended nor explained. i will love you, and you will be loved by me. but i will not…
The world came into black and white, not like a movie, but the way a dog saw it: low to the ground, up the ass, running with no purpose/filled with the urge to find myself somewhere in the zig-zag path of movement my head bobbing incessantly, my tongue catching the taste of petrol in the air slowly, I let the…
After When I finally left the stage to little more than polite applause, I had no strength of will to wipe the makeup off, nor any desire to shed the costume as dear to me as skin. In years past, I’d have moved beyond today in minutes and stepped outside to take a long walk home—all thoughts on tomorrow, sure…