By Kailash Srinivasan In Karol Bagh, New Delhi, the streets are narrow, crammed with low-rise houses, people and bicycles and the housewives prefer buffalo milk to cows’. You’re Bala, you’re twelve and your hands are soft, your school uniform is white and boring, and your handwriting is right-slanted and cursive. You live with your grandma, who perhaps hasn’t seen a…
By Lisbeth Coiman I love you in Spanish because in my mouth your name sounds thick like honey A slow drip down my thighs Each vowel open accented marking the syllables like a poem in Braille My fingers sliding softly on your chiseled biceps with dexterity on the darkness of your skin The rhotic erres roll from the…
By Adaora Raji When sand flies with the whirlwind and lands in my eyes, I do not close my eyes because I know that if I do, they may never open again. I am not afraid when a dust devil takes a fierce swipe at my face. I am not afraid of the rattlesnakes that hide in the sand or…
By Jed Myers To have breathed all these days and crossed another winter’s start— to have ridden this rolling pebble through the light’s narrows again! To weather the long dark falling on toward the chance of skunk cabbage clean out of the mud— I spotted a hummingbird poking the shrubs for buds in the lean sun, days past the solstice,…
By Miguel Murphy St. Jerome Writing (1605), Caravaggio Memento mori as apology for assaulting the lawyer Pasqualone, earning him Papal favor! There, in his brow, not Lear, let’s say, but Hamlet, if he’d survived to annotate his latest on guts, tears, and semen: Some Notes on Treatment as Prevention, in which he’d snigger, Don’t eat the malus. pate. What…
By Aïcha Martine i ask for the room by the window they say, honey, you know this isn’t a hotel, right? but kindly, like i just don’t understand things yet i heard doctors don’t have a sense of humor, that if they do, it is phone-cord extra-twisted so i don’t ask about the “cleaning fee” and the…
By Sean Cho A. and everyone else followed. It was December and the trees were bare and unrecognizable. I welcomed the Canadian geese to my back porch with stale rye bread. My past self used to howl for this and that but I tamed him with daily meetings, ugly proclamations, and long prayers. My body has been silent in…
By Matt Dennison Don spends his days walking up and down the street, now, for the exercise, with a straight black cane to support his white Bermuda legs. He waves. I raise my hand from across the street. Between the passing cars he knife-motions the black threads stitched into his throat: lung removed. Points to hip, leg, and side: twenty-foot…
By Elya Braden Devourer (2007), Dana Schutz inspired by Devourer by Dana Schutz What if people could eat themselves? – Dana Schutz, 2007 Before satisfaction, the abandonment of restraint. How long…
By DM O’Connor we walk past pears and apples and grapes and broccoli all fruiting in their five o’clock last day of summer fields although I know tomorrow it will rain and the money will be gone I can’t help but count the passing which are mostly work vans or tractors pulling trailers and she says no one walks around…