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Those Old Chromosomes Were Known to Ramble
by Ian Hall My mother’s father was a fountof cockeyed wisdom. Wooed by the far flung & farther fetched, he leftmy mother & her own sainted mother in an ungentlemanly lurch. Said he was fishingfor dignified work. Something that wouldn’t just make ends meet, but knockthe socks clean off his naysayers. Instead he spent the…
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INCANTATION
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…
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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 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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If I Could See You In Miami
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…
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Aphrodite as a Fat Woman
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…
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My Mother & I Put Our Differences Aside to Poison Benjamin Netanyahu’s Fish Tacos
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…
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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…
