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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BRUSQUE RECITAL by Christopher Brean Murray
A scarab beetle steeps in spruce shade. “Vast and inhospitable” is how his vision was described. The urn was unearthed in pristine condition. “Beware the maelstrom,” she said with a smile. I realized the gorge was behind the house. The seminar was long and exclusively cerebral. The party: brief and mood-altering. Do you remember the…
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SORROW by Megan Pinto
Everything lost is returned again in sorrow.Love lays to rest in a dark glen of sorrow. Handsome men study their faces in glasstemples I built, saying amen to sorrow. My fingertips turn violet under cold water.I read this as omen when I am in sorrow. Tiger moth, peacock & devil’s butterfly stunned behind plastic by children…
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I AM THE GRASS OF THE WIND ALLEY by Sarah Riggs
From The Heart Weighs In, a Revolt I am the grass of the wind alley, the tepid stream of bird song, the glint of reasonable doubt, the threat of the last hour, the smile of the still falcon the quandary of mourned daylit webs. I am sun auburn-flecked shells I am childhood and old age,…
FICTION
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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…
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QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT by Linni Kral
The day Dick disappeared, I woke up fuming. We’d had a row—the word we’d agreed to use when it wasn’t quite a fight. We overpronounced it for effect, yawning the vowel like we were English, like cow, like ow. We hadn’t gotten to bed ‘til north of midnight, or rather, we’d gotten in bed, then…
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SPLIT UNIT by Ryan Bender-Murphy
For so long, the first thing I’d see in the morning was Gabby, her head against the pillow, and it was enough to complete the day. I didn’t need to look at anyone else or go anywhere else; I could simply go back to sleep. But whenever I woke and saw her, I thought I…
TRANSLATION
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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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THE HEART OF A SIREN by Margo Rejmer, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
From the recent collection The Burden of Skin. The sea was groaning like a wounded beast. Is the sea hungry? Or thirsty? Is it afraid? Dawn was slipping through holes in the thin curtains. Lying in bed, Enriko began to make out the contours of objects. He listened to the sea. It was calling…
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THREE POEMS by Bejan Matur, translated from the Turkish by Nell Wright
No spring The Judas-trees have bloomedwe’re mourning againno springno countryand blood everywhere. When kissing the earth They talked about a cavalry girlwalking. Tenacitycrossing valleys, mountains.Saying as she goes,how much I believedhow bound I was.Foremost when climbingmountains and valleys,kissing the earth with a breathno one knows.As if the mountains were beginning for the first…
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