Veronica Tucker Counterfactual, With Light Left On There is a version of me who leaves the house cleanly keys in hand no inventory the sink empty counters bare no small shoes by the door the body is uninterrupted it…
Browsing: Poetry
Pichchenda Bao MOTHER TONGUE My mother once told me, “When you were born, they kept calling you black. So I named you Diamond.” What I took away was not how precious I am, but how much she wanted…
The Far Side of the Moon is Another Form of Absence –after Luisa A. Igloria by Lorraine Rice Mostly I return the cold shoulder with a coiled tongue of distrust. I want to believe without…
The Language of Our Mothering -For Kai by Avery Irons Before you were born, a small, but solid enough, part of me feared that blood was the only ingress. And then I held you, and with blue-gray eyes, so…
Jenny Molberg HEREDITARY – Yyvonne Deakins Collins, Elaine de Kooning, 1968 She spoke and the breasts heard singing. Heard song and called back. Fern closed in around her face. Without a word, the room brimmed lemon, lemon and veins…
Kathy Nelson BEFORE I DIE Some great uncle passed it down, that curio, that heirloom, that tour de force— seamless wooden links lifted from the branch, whole, already interlocking, as if by magic, with nothing but a pocketknife. Let…
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor IBEJI A Fibonacci Poem The day after his birth she traced the blue hill ridge of his ear whispered Ibeji Light spilled in the streets of his grandfather’s ancestral home twin boy talking to trees. (In the Nigerian…
Jessica Barlevi [After the first child, I knew] After the first child, I knew. The prize at the end of the pregnancy is not the child. It is the stay. On the maternity ward. Where it is warm and…
Jennifer Case The Machinery Is In Order But We Are Still Fearful Jennifer Case is the author of The Carework Project: Reckoning with Love, Labor, and the Living World (forthcoming from Trinity University Press), We Are Animals: On…
Amy Dryansky Flowers That Bloom Early & Disappear They Call Ephemeral Witch hazel unfurls its ragged, yolk-yellow stars, ++++++& herons arrive, awkward bodies hunched astride their haphazard nests ++++++empty & silent for now, but soon— & robins return puffed…