Latest Writing
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To Tread the Past with Empathic Attention: Interview with Arden Levine on SPOKE
Until Arden Levine’s Spoke, we didn’t realize we’d actually been waiting for someone to reinvent the wheel. Yet here it is, with its clean lines and hard curves, each perfectly crafted poem a tensile strand of bodily sinew radiating from a hub of composed observation. At that hub, the life and early death of a…
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Arielle Hebert’s Debut Is an Elegy for Her Queer Girlhood in a Circus Town
Arielle Hebert and I are approximately 7, 100 miles apart from one another when we hop on Zoom to talk about her debut collection of poems, Bottom Feeders – neither of us in the places we grew up, though that’s exactly what Bottom Feeders is all about. Hebert’s debut is a gutsy, sultry collection, set…
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INTERVIEW with SOON JONES
If I had only one word to describe These Aren’t My Woods Anymore, the debut collection of poems by Soon Jones, it might be lush. This collection is lush in its immersion in the natural landscape of the rural American South. It is lush in the language of emerging sexuality, in what it means to…
POETRY
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I THINK YOU SHOULD NOT LET THIS TORTURE YOU by Miriam Milena
When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished. –Czeslaw Milosz Words from a man I want to make my husband: I think you should go for the biggest thing you can think of— I go for a walk under old growth Sitka spruce— look at the ground— try to imagine all the biggest things I…
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PERIHELION by Ben Kline
The summer after Halley’s Comet swung do-si-doaround the solar system, I grew six inches,and a local boy who helped usbale hay on Saturdaysnecked me behind the corn criblike a fawn on a salt block,his eyes too bright to deny.My belly burned for days. After a weekin binoculars, the comet taught meabout sublimation and Kepler, spacetimeas…
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INCOMPLETENESS THEOREM by Eleanor Stanford
The train to the city was alwayslate. I dressed in silk straps decoratedwith every seductive spell.I pricked myself to test their strength. Buta system cannot demonstrateits own consistency. I did not longto merge with the mathematician. In hisstark apartment at Ninth and South, wecollided. We made adiagonal argument.My living situation took a long timeto explain.…
FICTION
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J MOOD by Gerald Majer
18 November 2024 I have no time in some respects, or so I believe. Too much also, that does not matter either. I was out in the arroyos and climbing the ridges and I did a prayer and I always say aloud the date but yesterday I came home and went online and saw I…
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THE DOG WHO COULD PHOTOSYNTHESIZE by Fox Rinne
The house was bright as a foreign star and utterly pristine. The dog was an appendage to this cleanliness. He was washed outside the house once a week. There was also a cat, but her cleanliness belonged to her. Every day she brought it upon herself. She never left the house, so she couldn’t be…
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BILLIONAIRE’S YACHT EXPLODES OFF THE COAST OF IBIZA by Shane Kowalski
The first thing he did after the finalization of the divorce was go to McDonald’s. She had banned the family from going to McDonald’s five years ago, when they built the new one on State, replacing the old and venerable State Street Theater. She had tried to stop it from happening. But they bulldozed the…
TRANSLATION
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Two Poems by Graciela Reyes, trans. Jackie K. White
Nightingale The good nightingalecarries her song in her throat. It’s me you were discovering. The joy of those sunrises:that we were our own joy. She knew how to skip contentedly, like a little tomboy, in the middle of the street.She knew how to speak, how to be silent, to sleep.Yes, she was lovely and sweetness,…
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Two Poems by Anzhelina Polonskaya, trans. Andrew Wachtel
Abyssal Like a whole winter. Like Bruegel in the snow with hunters,and kennels of barking dogs.In deep barbarism, in the depths of perpetuity,in the fury of flames, February lasts for years. Dead.But its shadow lives.And I grow in its shadow like bitter grass,unable to shatter the fetters of ice, listening your breath, my sadness.My sadness:…
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FOUR POEMS by Marie Lundquist, translated from the Swedish by Malena Mörling
What do we do with what we lack? A cleft palate weakness, a harmony,a sibling with whom to share ourselves. Quick and quarreling the rainfalls on memories no one is polishing. A few remain, hidden as if insecrecy. New names ring over the graves, mute and soft likemoss-mouths. …
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