“Let me tell you about being female” rings, obliquely, the salvo and refrain of Sarah Giragosian’s stunning poem “Missing Person.” In this deft and original work, we are reminded of the modern adage that men are afraid of being embarrassed by women; women are afraid of being killed […]
Mutant, you said, and we understood. Moonlight unlocks murder dreams, the angels sober. In the mystic classroom, we clapped our hands at the seeds of sacred dignity sewn into the skin of western philosophy. Simple. The cells marched. Mother, you re-mother. Bones bloomed and the bodies once inside […]
Ginny Threefoot received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has recently appeared in collaboration with artist Anne Lindberg at Carrie Secrist Gallery in Chicago and Haw Contemporary in Kansas, City, MO. Their exhibit “Think Like the River” will open at the Figge Art Museum […]
Timothy Donnelly is the author, mostly recently, of The Cloud Corporation, winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Award, and The Problem of the Many, which will be published by Wave Books this October. He teaches in the Writing Program of Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
The self says, I am; The heart says, I am less; The spirit says, I am nothing. —Theodore Roethke Say I’m clover and Queen Anne’s lace, devil’s paintbrush and lupine. Say I’m a yard of junked cars, each with its corona of broken glass and never-mowed grass. […]
“Let me cuddle with a dog I don’t even know.” —bathroom stall graffiti Let stray cats trust their matted hides to my hand. May the next squirrel kit who falls from tulip poplar to leaf bed curl into the kin- pink of my palm. May houseflies wobble […]
Toothless starlight, sing to me now. Low moon, skin-swaddled and ancient, speak from the I of the atmosphere—loosely livid, dropped under. Carved smoke, red water, neck ache— Whatever ate their hearts has spared you; start living in reverse. You are allowed to begin somewhere. You are allowed to […]
Brynn Saito’s “First Lines” and “Last Lines” weave together imperatives, fragments, and questions to create a mosaic of prayer. In these lines, the mystic trembles next to the animal, and sometimes is what’s animal in us. Line by line, the movements shimmer and resonate, and sometimes within a […]
Anna Maria Hong’s first poetry collection, Age of Glass, won Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s 2017 First Book Poetry Competition and the Poetry Society of America’s 2019 Norma Farber First Book Award. Her novella, H & G, won the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway […]
Anna Maria Hong is a lyrical spellcaster enticing the reader to spiral down the rabbit hole of her extraordinary mind. Whether she’s composing coiling sonnets, or writing about termites and vultures for her next collection Fablesque, or acting as heir to the late, great Angela Carter and crafting […]