I grew up immune to the ordinary, surrounded by a past / I was expected to sit on and memorize

before their war, the Aqlla served / overflowing quinoa milk / to unworthy undeserving grins

i know you’re thinking of me: it’s just about to rain.

Fady Joudah’s newest poetry collection […] (Milkweed Editions, March 2024), written during the bombardment of Gaza from October to December 2023, marks the loss of language during an ongoing genocide.

Monica Youn is one of the most brilliant people you will ever meet. This seems to be a shared consensus among the people I know who have also met her.

I can still feel / my father’s hands / pulling my hair / into a rough ponytail

an exercise in mining the worst possibilities from the ridges / of the brain absent of stalagmitic reach

I was twenty-seven when I saw him again, at a birthday party for my sister that uncomfortably straddled the line between our broke college years and some recently adopted bourgeois values.

Jami Nakamura Lin is a Chicago-based writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Electric Literature, and Bat City Review, but you might know…

I’m writing a book about fires. Metaphorical and literal. About the way human relationships spontaneously combust. How a self crashes and burns.

Beauty also is unaccounted for. / The mist is merely what it is: water

As a Californian, Daniel Gumbiner has thought a lot about the aftermath of disaster. What happens long after the emergency workers and news cameras have gone home?

I grow daffodils now, try to reimagine / night and pretend that doors are / simple.

We leave our offerings. We prepare the meat the way / we were taught, snap the wing, relish the song of crack

When my mother left for the man with a cruel son, I kept / my nails sharp for when he would draw back, swing. I left

Site is a four-part series of visual poems/essays/works. Each work reproduces the Trinity Test site in New Mexico—the location of the first atomic blast the world has known—at specific moments in time after the detonation.

When I get to heaven I will be bruised / and I will not answer any of God’s questions.

And yet: my work is labor the way love is labor, is liability, is constant risk assessment.

Lobsang kept saying that crossing fates with me would get him killed. When we first got on the road, an old woman at the foot of the mountain had been…

Mazin, our first, arrives in 92. He comes out at three and a half kilograms, which the doctor tells me is normal.

A drowning person will not splash and wave, will not shout or call out for help. Contrary to the ways in which it is dramatically performed on television and in film, drowning is nearly always physically unexpressed, measurably silent.

Reading my grandfather’s notebooks, I’m trying to / know madness as a way of searching.

I met Christine during a balmy summer at the Winter Tangerine workshops in New York.

Through the logic and lens of horror films, Reed examines the market demands of poetry (yes, these do exist), academic life, and the anxieties produced by the COVID-19 pandemic and rising fascism.

My father said there were no other / words like the compound words / in the Armenian language.

Farah Ali’s novel, The River, The Town (Dzanc Books, 2023), set in an unnamed municipality in the south of Pakistan, reads like an eerie fictional mirror to an Amnesty International report released the same year.

“atmospheric river” they say, as if we are children, / as if air was water, as if all was just one phase change away

Lisa Teasley’s first three books, Glow in the Dark, Dive, and Heat Signature came out in 2002, 2004, and 2006 respectively.

We were on the roof of Nikita’s house, drinking beers. This is in the Central Valley. The roof was black and, so, hot. It wasn’t summer yet, but almost.

I have known Joshua Burton since 2014 when we attended the Boldface Workshop at the University of Houston.

The Devil knew exactly where to go. There were plenty of places in the world where the sun slanted long across plaza stones and shone like diamonds in the spray of fountains.

When I was 12, dad took me to the darkroom to help him develop film. He wanted to show me the enlarger, the dangerous developer liquid, and why red light won’t react with silver salt.

The plastic surgeon, a short, blond-gray mustachioed man comes in to tell me he’s headed to the OR and will see me in there. He taps the rail of my bed twice, a gesture I take as doctorly affection, and turns to leave the room. I call after him, “Just remember—think small—like, real small. Like, just get rid of ‘em!” Dr. Haynes reminds me that this breast reduction is not cosmetic surgery.

how easy it is to erase rusting yellows? / how easy to let blues blue into zombi? / how easy / is ease?

Still, she liked what she had become. She slept in a den of sticks of her own making. Language and its judgment escaped her. Was being animal closer to God than innocence? Her voice was her breath. She was still alive.