Keep above the waterline of breath. The level rises, recedes, the gravitational pull of it, a border contouring the bones of the face, soft chambers of the throat. Fluids have their own willfulness too holy to constrain. We say that there’s a gurgle in the chambers of the heart, or a murmur. The...
There was a time when the world, as I came to understand it, held its breath. I took those years and bloomed into you. Like a pale rider, a searching cold reached through the city and drew away any powers of spinning old into new. Every flake of snow seemed to whisper You will never be still. I was...
The house had been yellow once. Óscar could see the places where the paint had peeled back entirely from the wooden siding, leaving splintered patches of grey in its wake. Its scabby state was of a piece with its other features: the missing shingles, the lawn blistered with weeds, the black door...
“Here are the ashes. / The days are beautiful.” —Ann Lauterbach All being said, the fathers of my wild hypothesis live near that dandelion clock fountain. All clean now: even the station beggars have PayID and the strip clubs close before the sushi train. On the second floor of an Art Deco...
I press my face to the bank. ….the mud smears my cheek with vowels. the water does not say my name, ….but it chews the syllables. stones shift like vertebrae, ….a spine grinding under weight. the current drags nails, hair, feathers— ….nothing it takes comes back intact. a...
Jake moved his knight. “How long are you going to drag this out?” The angular black horse had a white scar in place of its left ear. This was the same set where one of the white pawns had vanished around the time Jake’s sister was born, and then been replaced with a wooden one on a slightly smaller...
Reviewed by Andrew Woodrow-Butcher Matthew J. Trafford, Runs in the Blood (Arsenal Pulp, 2025), 184 pp., $21.95. An older brother goes viral after murdering a dog. A stepfather’s homophobia rubs off on his gay stepson. A butch lesbian feels out of place at the princess party she brought her...
Interview by Loch Baillie In this contributor spotlight, poetry editor Loch Baillie talks with Plenitude author Adam Arca about duality, mythology, and liberation movements, and how they converge with Adam’s poetry. Adam is a Filipino migrant rights organizer and writer living on unceded Musqueam...
Plenitude Magazine is excited to announce another new editor! Join us in welcoming Ambrose Albert as one of our new Associate Prose Editors, alongside Joelle Kidd. We couldn’t be luckier! Ambrose has previously been published in Plenitude, you can check out his poems “witchbride”...
