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

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…

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.

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

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.

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…

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

One night, my father will come home late with a rifle in his hands / yelling “I’m here.” Everyone will laugh. / Every corner of the ocean is the same.

After Graham stopped returning my texts, I started leaving little parts of myself all over the Internet. In his early twenties, especially, Graham left doorways to himself everywhere—not just the normal abandoned social portals of MySpace and Friendster, but also a blog with a cursor shaped like a hot pink mouth. When I clicked on an entry, the disembodied lips smacked. Sickened, I kept clicking as the computerized sucking noise pulled me into page after page of journal entries, photos, digital check-ins at bars where he’d time-stamped his arrival.

The horoscope writer kills herself on a Tuesday. It is, by coincidence, the day the weekly paper comes out. Townspeople read her column and find it mundane but also uncanny. Here, some of them feel, are words from beyond the veil.

If I had known all boats eventually yield / to the current, I would have readied myself / long ago