Author: Christopher Wilson

by Omotara James How do I love1 this body?Cradle it in gauze, like a thirddegree burn? My mother loves2 my fatto be covered, specificallythe affected areas:arms, belly, back and thighs.The darker the meat, the morevulnerable to light. Her hands,the first to sheathe and swaddle.Her wrists, weaving the inauguralspells. Her fingers, holding the spoonI open my…

by S. Yarberry The roadkill-deer has its neckslung back— nose to spine—throat taut, the skinunbroken, but barely. I’d say it was swooningaristocratically. Graceful—balletic. When we first met,you would text me:u make me swoon. Of course,I would think: u make me swan.B/c? Why not? I revelin false cognates—An aesthetic bird, the swan.Aggressive. Violent. Beautiful.The soft hook of…

by Faylita Hicks Lying in my bed beneath the covers, the hours turninto pools of years—sans distinction. If I stay here long enough, still enough,I can hear the cloud of my own ocean aching to fill my crowded nook.The waves of my pulse easing its way up the sand of my legs,up the sand of my hands, into the…

by Faylita Hicks If I am in Albuquerque, it is to borrowtime as a reclaimed silhouette of womxn singing in my lover’s entryway—a cloud,heavy—over the headboards. Look I am here now. An ache gyrating through the artist’s studioin Houston, jerking on a bear-backed rug, my fat breasts in my lover’s hands like wet bowls of feathers.What smokes more…

by Katie Berta as many of them as I’ve eaten, to the chagrin of my husband,who eats every meal: meat and carrots meat and carrots meat and carrots.Now I buy the fancier ones, not the Hot Pockets of my childhood but vegetarian kormaand vegan lasagna and Thai coconut soup heated with a plate over its…

by Katie Berta I am a truth but also I am a truth beneath an I, like a skin under a skin or layers and layers of clothes, which means I don’t have to listen when someone tells me the truth of my truth on the surface, the skin-truth that doesn’t at all account for…

by Rushi Vyas When I found my Bapu’s body hangingI felt everything at once. Not sadness. Not relief. Not fury. Not this. That was no outof body experience, no moksa, no warbler on its last breath, no morning mist rising off a highway, meadow, or sound.When I found Bapu dead it was everything. No sun on my soaked…

by Sara Kaplan-Cunningham I’ve fired a gun only once:With my father in Maine.The instructor was a hairy, uncle-man,Walked like he was being filmedFor a commercial advocating our Second AmendmentRights. One hand on his holster, the other thumbingHis jawline. Safety was important to him,He said. So, when I hit the target and swiveledTo see my father’s…

by Darren Higgins Remember the smell of wood smoke and wet leaves and sweetcut grass in the buzzing field. The moon hanginglike a curl of smoke above the mountains. How sleep finally comes. A snap of electricitywhen you flick off the light. It’s like a fly caughtbetween the blinds and the window. Lemon soap. Pomegranate shampoo. Darren Higgins…

by John Sibley Williams Dying two hundred timeswith as many rebirthssounds like a lot work; papering the earth redwithout so much as a war,no sacrifice, tears, eulogy. & never the same sparrows,never knowing more thana season or two the living bodies born in your arms.Remember how terrifiedwe were those long sleepless nights huddled over cribswaiting for the absence of…