Month: January 2022

From the Author: These poems were animated from the mourning of my gender dysphoria: a past self has had to be dismantled with the very hands which once held and protected them. When some part of you has been diligently grown and watered for the sake of your survival, and you have come to find… Continue reading J. Haesoo Jeung

Homewrecker You’d have to understand the home as a unified construct, as a guarded entity, locked up like a bank vault, a virgin, or like a rarified set of collectible dolls with no inherent value but worth agreed upon. You’d have to really buy into that, the quality of the dolls’ cornsilk hair, or wee… Continue reading Erin Hoover

Sad Girl Sonnet #15 I leave museums too fast like the men in the morning— no coffee, maybe a kiss on the cheek, sometimes I’ll call you. I stroll by Michelangelo paintings, some da Vinci, whole rooms of Botticelli. Still, there is no limit to my dissatisfaction with the world. Nothing feels right, throat burning.… Continue reading Diannely Antigua

HORRORS one day you wake with an old man’s dick in your hand and it’s your own VD JOKE you’ll get it later and you’ll laugh D. A. Powell’s books include Chronic and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys. He received the 2019 John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters… Continue reading D. A. Powell

SUGAR STACK, SKYBABY As kids we’d fuck around in the abandoned mine like it was a vintage schoolhouse. My hair both hair and kerchief, sometimes also our flag. Dashed with thistles for its stars. I couldn’t tell you how to get back there except accident. Road now paved at least on surveillance footage. My hair… Continue reading Mary Biddinger

HOW TO STAY SAFE When your wife asks if you want another child, tell her that the sun’s core is nuclear fusion that will one day consume the Earth, that the corner cemetery is wet and full of quiet bodies. There are guns on the news today—a grocery and a synagogue, and a school is… Continue reading W. Todd Kaneko