Category: 19.1

by Christian Sommartino Ever since the emergency room,I’ve stayed up late, with my ear to your chest, listening with my makeshift stethoscope. Your breath is the hushed battle of crocusesbreaching through layers of slush and mudto poke their defiant beauty into the dawn. I hear legions of blizzards leaving almanacs of snow and silence inside your lungs, attempting…

by Richard Prins —A pantoum found in Dr. Martin Tobin’s testimony at Derek Chauvin’s trial I’m primarily interested in breathing.It’s what you have to dowhen everything else is failing.Mr. Floyd has his face rammed into the street. It’s what you have to doto get air moving in and out.Mr. Floyd has his face rammed into…

by D.S Waldman Far dryness of the moon, cold                                                                 and hanging. Its distortion                 on the…

by Rebecca Ruth Gould My father liked to photograph the snippet—not the fullness—of the instant. On weekends and holidays,we built archives in our basement. Our darkroom chamberbecame an alchemist’s paradise.Ammonia bleached dark film light.His gloves were pulled tight. My plastic-clad wrists were tapedso fluids wouldn’t seep in& damage my childhood skin.I imitated his every movement.…

by Brett Hanley Our new dog, home two weeks from the shelter,buries each of the bones we give her in the yard,as soon as they’re in her possession, as if the joythey might bring is confusing and too much. A single creep of kudzu is making its way across the same yard, and I ask if we…

by Susan Coronel After Aracelis Girmay It is good to praise the grandfather who is dead. Holy love dwelled in your Polish accent, words as thick as shoe polishthat you spat out like a curse, to mimic the villagers who spaton you. War turns even a language ugly. Your holy worldwas my grandmother—your first cousin through…

by Lucy Waigner I swallowed fifty aspirin, vomited—red as the August streets of Rome.My mother held my hand as she did when we walked the streets of Rome. A century earlier, no one saw Quentin Compson drown himselfin Mississippi—a place that lives forever, like ancient Greece or Rome. My first day, one of the boys…

by Arielle Hebert We were the kind of girlsthat brought a bat to prom,smoked cigarettes in the parking lot,sequined party dresses cutabove the knee, trim calves burstingfrom black heels, curls fallingflat in the humidity,the kind of girls that shotgunned beers,belched reapplying our lipstick,popped in a peppermint to walkpast the vice principal and into the disco…