CAELEN MCQUILKIN
[…] the desert hues that usually fade into the background fill the entire landscape, and I wonder, what happens when the whole world around you becomes the colors that usually uplift other things?…Continue Reading About a place between places
ANNIKA BAJAJ
We met that night on a drawbridge, in the rain: you with golden hair plastered to your face, tangling up in long eyelashes your mother likes to call ‘ladylike’ and you tend to label as ‘inconvenient.’ …Continue Reading Combustible Potions
GRACE ESCOE
Great Chasm / An inch filled with a single board / Yet still vast / Yet still devoid // Concrete / Loads of hardened gray / Pillars of stone / All to endeavor / To contain You…Continue Reading Connect
CAROLYN THOMAS
[…] even though her mouth wasn’t open. Henry still heard his mother’s voice in the ugliest most peculiar way possible shout, “I hate him! I want to kill him. I hope that bastard dies in his sleep.”…Continue Reading Crossing into Minds
DAVIS RENNELLA
For this solitary space traveler, what had started as a bold expedition to new horizons for his people had become a disorienting journey through a galaxy…Continue Reading Welcome to Earth
By ANONYMOUS
A small stream bubbles below a little bridge whose boards creek disconcertingly when stepped on. Surrounding greenery hums in the wind. Time slows down here, or perhaps doesn’t exist here at all. …Continue Reading Disappearing Bridge
ESTEBAN SANCHEZ
I walk with you through a field of wild grass on a path laid out for us by others. Dandelion seeds float slowly, discernible against the blue sky, like white snowflakes that fall in other parts of the world….Continue Reading Reification: A Question in Serial
EVELYN CHI
To be loved / Is to wake up to a bowl of steaming hot 稀飯 / Tender, bright orange 地瓜 floating / In a sea of glistening 白飯, / To have the tablemat set out already…Continue Reading 阿嬤, 我想你
BLUMA HAMMARHEAD
Here is– the monument, / The bare room heavy with artifacts: / Strange velvet balls, stacks / Of letters, papers, / Old journals full of hypotheticals…Continue Reading Going Back
MIKAYAH PARSONS
She hugs her arms to her chest, wearing a white baby tee and velvet black lounge pants, dangling her legs over the edge of the bridge when I join her. …Continue Reading Bridges
RACHEL HENDRICKSON
The woods were broken, Willa decided. The woods were broken, and she didn’t know how to fix them. The Earth always died when December came, but she still found a beauty in it then….Continue Reading A Spot of Pond
SARAH WU
On the same bridge where my brother threatened to cast his body into the river, you tell me: “Wouldn’t it be fun to jump?” We sit together on the railing. Your eyes are the same color as the sky…Continue Reading Moth to a Burning Flame
GABY WEAVER
And there’s nothing I can do to stop myself from breaking into a smile, planting a kiss on your forehead, and whispering, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”…Continue Reading Saturday Morning Ritual
PAULINE BISSELL
That was the week the grapes were swelling and bruising / Purple, dust-seasoned. Again / We filled our pockets until the grapes, sun-burnt / And sun-ripened, burst…Continue Reading Skies Beyond Skies
SOFIA TENNENT
[They…] are larger than when she last spent time observing them. A headache threatens her temples as she questions yet again what might make this home look right for a family….Continue Reading Perfect and Yellow-Starred
SONIA CHAJET WIDES
When I was eleven, I started taking the subway alone; I learned what it meant to pick myself up and walk myself down as the train roared rickety […] I was a traveler in my own city….Continue Reading Ferried
EMILY WYKOFF
A blonde woman stands on the Brooklyn Bridge, waiting. Lifting her hand, she brushes a strand of perfectly curled hair into her scarf. She waits patiently, eyes staring off into the distance. …Continue Reading Stars Fallen From The Sky
ELEANOR WALSH
Once upon a time in a land far, far away there lived three sisters. The oldest sister had long, dark hair and knuckles that hissed when they were cracked. …Continue Reading The Three Sisters
TRISTAN MOORE
“How do you think I got lice?” / My client turns her head to an angle, eagerly awaiting a response / I can’t help but think, “How the hell would I know? I’m just here to get rid of it.”…Continue Reading A Strand of Opportunity
MIKAYAH PARSONS
Broken Black heart. / Tattered Black heart. / Broken Black fish. / Battered Black fish. / Black fish out of water. // I offered my Black heart on a silver platter, / And they took it for the slaughter….Continue Reading Broken Black Heart
TIIA MCKINNEY
Sparkling dark blue waters violently crashed over my head, / They pinned me under their strong currents, forcefully grabbing me in a chokehold / I desperately inhaled, trying to taste the salty air on my tongue,…Continue Reading Sea of Sorrow
ZOE ALARCON
You would approach your mother’s bed / Afraid of an intruder / Now you approach it / Afraid of yourself / Hoping she can save you from eternal tinnitus / Drown it forever with a peaceful sonata …Continue Reading Ruminations
SOFIA HINCAPIE-RODRIGO
1. It’s a hot one, even for the South—the kind of summer where we are sticky with sunscreen and smelling like a flurry of coconuts and careless adolescence….Continue Reading Flashbulb Memory and the Things I Have to Remind Myself to Forget
SARAH WU
On the day my brother gets his college admissions, he picks his envelope up ever so gently, drags a finger across the edge of the flap, and peels back the white like he would peel back the skin of a banana. …Continue Reading my brother gets his college admissions letter
SAM SPRATFORD
before i learned to swerve down / narrow city streets— / i fell / i fell in love with the existentialists’ sooty prose / peering into an opium abyss and seeing my reflection in obsidian and…Continue Reading the breakfast date (break, fast!)
PRISCILLA LEE
Λόγος σάρξ ἐγένετο, scan my pinking flesh, / dented divots from my inky pen, no / 墨 to drink. Excuse me, I play with babbles, / singing your scribbles. // Draw it out. Pray, jazz with me. Pluck the hairy / strokes and Trace calligraphy.
…Continue Reading I Broke My English
CAROLYN THOMAS
The winds howl outside, and the rain smacks the ground with a heavenly force. Although it is nighttime, the lightning strikes illuminate the sky—the clapping sound of thunder echoes outside. …Continue Reading Pause and Break
PAULINE BISSELL
So, the will still bends / Beyond the sentimental / And you, still / Wielding the fissured, the fragmented, / The crumbling under and cracking apart….Continue Reading Hamadryad
GRACIE ROWLAND
I slammed the door in Hope’s face and told Her / I was better off alone, my pride too brazen to realize that good intentions / Matter more than harsh words spoken over late night calls. / I was too ashamed to apologize back then, too ashamed of the broken hinges I left. …Continue Reading Broken Hinges
GRACIE ROWLAND
I dance under the imagined warmth of the moonlight, / Twirl from one end of the rose garden to the other / Until my head is spinning, spinning, with the / Stars like a laughing tapestry above my head. / I forget about funerals and fallacies, / Genocide and god under the moonlight….Continue Reading Not Let Go of Hope