Category: Poetry

by G.H. Plaag for Aiden Hale Tennessee rain is like the dewon a plum. whether you are clingingto the cliffs of Chattanooga or antiquingin Elizabethton, this holds true.today’s rain is the freezerburnon a Hungry-Man, ruinous and specific,shards in mashed potatoes. the rainfalls and reminds me where i amand what has happened here this year. Tennessee…

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…

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…

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…

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…

By Connor Watkins-Xu 1993 Young, younger, your mother, states away. No onecalls you crater-faced. You get to be Stephanie for a while. Summer goes until December, and boys love to hear you sayY’all are crazy down here, your Alabama accent in the ear for a moment, like sun-showers on beach-burned skin.You don’t have to worry…

By Elizabeth Higgins I. Seventh grade humanities class. Ancient Greece.Each table group is a city-state. Each teacher is a god. I sit in the southeast corner of Corinth.Our teacher stands in front of the class and tells us she is Aphrodite. There’s snickering because the idea is absurd,the comedic formula familiar: fat woman thinks she’s…

by Ivy Raff You mean you could poison anyone on earth& you didn’t choose me? Her mouth an O.She wasn’t wholly wrong: temptation it wasto flick a grain of cyanide salt at its center. We got bigger fish to fry, ma. She didn’tlaugh at the pun. I sprinkledthe poison into the batter. Adjusted my KN-95against…

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…

By Amanda Auchter Tomorrow I will dieif I eat this pear. If I eat this perfect almond, thisapricot. A whole bowl of fear at my fingertips—lips numbed, breath out of breath. Once,I boarded an airplane and began my ascentof panic. I begged my husband to ask the flightattendant to ask the pilot to turn the…