Sari in a tear, face an ungodly mess, run of red from one lip to the other. Over there a blue-skinned flirt, a Krishna, looking past me at the goddess from the next lifetime, the one with the light eyes who shows off her belly ring, swings her […]
On September 29-30, 1941, approximately 33,771 Jews were murdered by the Nazis at Babi Yar, a ravine in Kiev. The massacre was among the largest single mass murders of Jews during WWII. A girl rose out of a wolf, peeled the soft fur down, ripped […]
Hadara Bar-Nadav is a singular voice in contemporary poetry. Her work often speaks to the aesthetics of violence and violation, offering an incisive deconstruction of suffering — and the power structures that set it in motion —-through the nuances of writerly craft. Here, expertly conceived poetic lines exist […]
After Jenny George Sunrise arrives just as it would anywhere. A raccoon sleeps in the dry fountain of the main square. Children drag dark red jump ropes along the streets behind them. There is a local motto, but no one can remember quite what it is. Something to […]
for Diamond Reynolds When they invite you to dinner, say yes. Arrive early, choose the chair closest to the door. Pay attention to who sits where. Pay attention to who drinks what. When they lay your lover’s body face down, Do not […]
Julia Madsen is a multimedia poet and educator. She received an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and is currently a PhD candidate in English/Creative Writing at the University of Denver. Her poems, multimedia work, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in jubilat, Tarpaulin Sky, […]
Not only does Nicky Beer have exquisite taste in skull print accoutrements, she has an exquisite brain: one in a continual state of inquiry as it roves, probes, mulls over the overlooked with the scrupulous observance of a documentarian. Her poems are the product of this mobile, curious […]
Hope is a thing with a name and I am personality calculator. I hunted for you in Internet lists. This stranger sea—each route too wayward by edges and vowel. A name is a settled, still home for the indefinite. Unknown love- […]
My mother assigns the couches names— Garbage, Salvation Army, T (my favored sibling)— she wants to control what remains. Clouds strain through threadbare seams. The legs have gnawed off their own skin, trembling atop the crippled feet of […]
These two prose poems from Grey Vild’s manuscript Dear Gone slip in and out of war, grief, entrapment—the sentences slipping from their syntax: the objects of verbs and prepositions sometimes go missing, so the reader doesn’t know what or who is on the other side of the action. […]