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Afghan Girl
by Caroline Fleischauer Amid a sea of tents slips a White man holding a camera. It’s 1984 and the camera—a Nikon FM2 with a Nikkor 105mm Ai-S F2.5 lens—is powerful enough to share grief between one side of the world and the other. The tent village sits across Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, near Peshawar. The…
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We Always Speak The Language of Colonisers
by Sher Ting Hinomaru. What’s mine is yours.All this earth and the blood raised on it.Kimigayo. How language becamea man with a trigger. And when I spokeabout grief, there was another warm bodyto pull from the dead. When we pronouncedKako (the past), we took only the lettersfrom our history. The o to mark the pointof…
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A Brief Alteration of Color
by Sarah Horner / hunger / taste / bruise / build/ ease / rest / dawn The sun is round. The sun is round warm gentle lightAt dawn. I look right at it. You wake up slowlyYou wake up slowly You wake up slowly / bloom Crack a window. Let the breeze meet Last night’s love-air / decay…
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The Dream Men
by Rebecca Bernard In my dreams, the boys love me. Our hands furious against one another’s sides. Often, there’s little fruition, only build up. Usually, I’m still married, but I’ve discovered a loophole that allows for each fleeting tryst, guilt-free. A sundae with whipped cream and two cherries. I call them boys, but they’re men, of…
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The Lungs Remember Breath
by Aliyah Cotton It was hopscotch and scraped knees yellow monkey bars and hands rubbed raw hands that knew exactly the weight of a pinecone and what it meant to the fallen thing to be noticed and held and thrown back down again and it was not caring that the grilled…
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Explaining White Privilege to My Ancestors
By Kimberly O’Connor it does not meanyou didn’t drive the muleup the mountain every morning it does not mean the outhousewas a pleasure it does not mean you had enough to eator that you grew up easy that no one ever looked at yousideways and mean-eyedthat you didn’t carry water from the spring it does…
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Caballerial
By Larry Narron I managed to fail ninth grade English lit with a curling issue of Thrasheror Big Brother hidden behind the paper bag-covered textbook in my lap, the one with the abridged version of Great Expectations.Our lives are mostly as small as a thumb nail photo sequence unfolding in a borrowed skate mag whose pages are allfalling out, one by one, like the…
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The Boy
By Franz Jørgen Neumann Martin is smitten the first time he sees the woman with the sexy nose. Neither pixie nor Roman, Jenny’s nose is longer than most, with comely nostrils. He tries not to stare as he takes the key she offers him. He thanks her for the bag of warm rolls, then carries…
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A Better Man
by Anthony Abboreno Claudette and Adam stood outside their RV, staring at the fish Adam had caught. Claudette hadn’t realized anything that huge grew in the Mississippi. It was the size of a Saint Bernard, its flesh gouged with scars like trails on an old mountain. Now, it lay in an inflatable wading pool decorated…
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wild
by Rebecca Callahan wild/wīld/ adjective: wild; comparative adjective: wilder; superlative adjective: wildest 1. (of an animal or plant) living or growing in the natural environment; not domesticated or cultivated. A small girl in a photograph: lined up with siblings and cousins, standing at the edge of her parents’ property, tangled hair hanging to her waist,…
