For mobile devices, this poem is best read in landscape orientation mode. Cecilia Stuart I put something down, you pick it up. I write theletter e and you pick it up. You go on waiting,waiting. I draw a barrier around myself. Closeenough for you to graze...
Lucas Crawford The swab isn’t sublingual after-all so for now my secret cure remains safe. He counted to three and went up my nose with a stick longer than the smallest dildo that my Montreal landlord stole. Great. Now I have a nasal fetish. Dare you to dig deeper than him and risk reaching the...
Tawahum Bige after Eve Joseph nipawatan wecîpweyânâhk nipihtos-mihko ewîkiyân tahtwayak ekwa âyiman I’m used to battlefield the way cannons fire and ancestors’ bones gather, just to shatter again. Dene rising are more story than poem— our throats carry cargo, long thought sunken...
Clara Otto I’m looking at my window when I realize there might not be anything special about it. I had always thought that it would reveal something—about the way dull senses wake up, without explanation, after years of monotony, or why walking down your childhood street can evoke a deep and sudden...
Grace When my succulent began turning yellow, it dropped one fleshy leaf every day, indifferent to my panic until only the stem remained naked and alone. You could still see the hollows that were homes for phantomed limbs, where love [was] tried. * I call my plants my children and give them either...
Rob Colgate Staring out the drippy window. Wanna go to the top of the rock. So happy up there boy so happy so happy. Want the river up there with me. Wanna be alone. Not my boyfriend. Covered in slimy nacre so the dirt is worth it. All of this used to be colder. Rain on the fire escape, street...
Ashley-Elizabeth Best The bench is moist from my sweat. I push my right knee down on its centre, left leg anchoring my body to the floor. My fingers grip the dumbbell as I methodically begin pulling the 50lbs up and down, my bicep flexes and tears, each pump tightening the slight curve of my inner...
Leslie Joy Ahenda the nice ones all got shot. a woman knots her fists & disregards her joints—swelling means her blood is not yet on pavement. in sleep a woman majesticizes a man unshackled. wakes to a man praying only for his brothers. please. nigga fronts like the lust in his eyes is a yellow...
James Collier cloud unsettling little winter, in April it is all local, grappling with small stakes and nothing real, Caeneus unknowable to the body I feel, glance down, glazed and terrible it is all so apathetic, the snow smothers what is not already home, and Caeneus, I am sorry, but the crush is...
Brian O’Neill Jud wasn’t agoraphobic when he moved in with me. We had been friends for years and he was one of the most social people I knew, which was why I was happy to invite him to live with me. (I mean, that and I could’ve used help with the rent.) The circumstances were rough—his ex’s...
Roxanna Bennett after “Bilingual Pathways” by Dominik Parisien In Paris the air tastes like pain, ancient, golden, Gauloises, Gitanes, paint the skin with guttersweat grease. I learn to limp through the Louvre, loving the Winged Victory of Samothrace...
Interview by Rob Bittner Here is the final of four interviews and story excerpts as part of our Youth Spotlight project. For details on this series, see our original post. “Sushi Tears” by Emma Bishop chronicles the process of coming out while also interrogating gender norms in the context of...
Interview by Rob Bittner Here is the third of four interviews and story excerpts as part of our Youth Spotlight project. For details on this series, see our original post. Rhyan St. Louis’s “To Be the Moon” utilizes a somewhat claustrophobic timeline along with earnest dialogue to create a palpable...
Michael Russell I hold the last picture of you fold it into the pocket of my mouth, chew. Daddy, you taste like love and devastation. My teeth rip you the way you ripped yourself from me. In front of the bathroom mirror I ask Where is Stephen? The steam lifts like a bridal veil and I vomit the wolf...
Interview by Rob Bittner Here is the second of four interviews and story excerpts as part of our Youth Spotlight project. For details on this series, see our original post. “How I Didn’t Go to Mexico” by James Cawkwell is a narrative about coming out as queer and trans, and the consequences that...
Steacy Easton A few years ago, I went to Boston in November, to give a talk at Harvard about healing and religion, in the context of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that raised me. The Latter-day Saints grew up in the 19th century in frontier areas, and I was mostly talking about...
Interview by Rob Bittner Here is the first of four interviews and story excerpts as part of our Youth Spotlight project. For details on this series, see our original post. “The Ostrich Wife” by Annie Bhuiyan is a semi-autobiographical examination of what it means to feel uncomfortable as a...
Abryna Bulford Nigankwam held my hand When spring blues hit me. Sometimes things don’t disappear, But change into something better. And here I am, whole, as I always was. What gift was I to give you, I ask myself, besides healing? I could not do it all, but only enough. And that is enough, is it...
Ani Kayode Somtochukwu Gloria used to say love was the greatest redeemer. She said this with her eyes closed and fingers fondly caressing a picture of my father, her sweaty hands smudging it to her chest. When I was younger, his pictures used to hang on every wall. He looked almost regal in them;...
Joelle Barron “These Texas gals are passionate about God’s beautiful design for womanhood…” – Girldefined.com Blonde godheads, god girls, proselytizing YouTube doll babies. Their blog favicon a white-panty period stain. Sweet girls, what do they desire? Girldefined, ecstatic girl-tongue. Girl is...
Kyeren Regehr granting of a penny wish druthers something beloved Am truly all those hackneyed phrases shopworn and cloying unbelieving Am madly tripping light-headed fantastically smouldering the grass with each step...
Julia Peterson Your safety is your personal responsibility. Always follow the road marked on your map, and do not stray too close to the sidewalk. Do not take shortcuts. The unkempt backyards and vacant lots may be enticing, but the hungry ground beneath the weeds has been abandoned for too long...
Isabel Yang On our first date, I throw crumbs to water- fowl. She says bread makes birds sick, It’s like junk food for them. Don’t let them eat the crust. On our second date, he pushed fingers in, and I opened up, thinking it was the same anodyne reflection on...
Jade Wallace after Jean Day Ours is a generation of wistful and somewhat attractive humans, wanderers in a bad and beautiful slough. We say that all we want are convincingly unisex jackets but what we mean is that we are tired of bitter butterfinger metaphysics, bored of biding our time in the...
Grace Kwan I was five years old when I dreamed of snow for the first time, tucked into my bed in our hilltop apartment in Cloud View Tower, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In my dream, my mom, dad, and I had just emerged from an air-conditioned building into the street’s simmering heat. I was accustomed to...
Karine Hack Mashup of Ocean Vuong’s “homewrecker” & Michael Ondaatje’s “The Cinnamon Peeler” when we swam once, white dresses spilling from our feet / in water, late August our mothers / left with no trace your father’s tantrum turned, turning our hands dark red as if wounded: a wildfire we...
David Ly Too many men are too afraid to be tender, too raw. My love makes me fearless with fangs and a flickering tongue plucked from a king cobra. I match the wildness someone else wished into you until you were abandoned. Nothing between us is forbidden, too much, too scary. Your harpy talons...
Annick MacAskill The universe gets a little heavy-handed when you’re around—the Bow still green all these kilometers down river; two geese and their tuft of fledgling: proof that the universe was once the size of a gumball. Time is a rubber band, we joke. Nothing like looking over and seeing you...
Peter KS Yu The powdery veins of white pigment float within the deep gray field of our concrete bathroom floor, wisps of cloud in a dark sky. My husband Neil and I put so much intention into making that floor just right. We first conjured a shared vision—a floor with depth, transparency...
Kaitlin Ruether One. Bright and fluid music softened Harriet as she emerged, three weeks ago, from Bloor-Yonge station into the pupil-sting of day. She ascended the subway steps and turned the corner to encounter three violinists, a cellist, and a percussionist whose snap-tap-tap snare rhythm...
For mobile devices, this poem is best read in landscape orientation mode. James Collier anonymous bumps in the darkwe body and couple and bodywestrict structures just too tired forwe send lovlies thatwe wont see spoken heardwe dig our hands into groinwe find ...
Zoë Johnson I dunno When I talk about my gender, I always end up leaning s i d e w a y s My vertebrae begin to bend into the shape of the word sorta See, I’ve been trying to solve the equation Of internal chickness and dude-ittude for years But when I try plotting the data points the...
A. Light Zachary A movie called Alien vs. Predator in which we go back in time to fight everyone who hurt us when we were young. A movie called Cowboys vs. Aliens about watching our backs at the club. A movie called Village of the Damned about our neighbourhood. A version of Invasion of the Body...
D. Simon Turner The scariest part was that they liked you, making jokes about the dick you don’t have. And there were some days you’d rather not sit with them at 9am “lunch,” congregating with the regularity of high-school cafeterias. Like the day when, each time you stood, you glanced at your...
Ron Schafrick If it was supposedly commonplace in the mythic suburban dream of the sixties and seventies for fathers to teach their sons how to throw a ball or how to make a fist to defend themselves, my father not only didn’t know it but he also would have regarded such things as useless and petty...
Matthew Walsh Still feel the nerve in my neck snap back at me, injury from when I fell down the stairs of the Embassy, stairs now vibrant with exes orange and aquarium light. If I was floating in the galaxy with fresh new stars when they put me in the tube shoot me to the moon my brain will appear...
Erin Anderson 1 The first time it happened, I was at my first real job, Curves Fitness, a women’s circuit gym. I was 16. She was 71. She looked relieved when I wasn’t angry, but she grew uncomfortable when I began talking about the unflattering cut of my jacket. She needed me to forget her...
Griffin Epstein my advice to future parents is be careful when you turn the bed notice who hears the argument...
Fraser Calderwood One time I broke Leo’s nose. He let the basketball bounce away and thwack the door of a parked truck and he pinned me on the driveway and sprayed blood on me from his nose. Specks of blood dried on the cement like my head was a stencil. I can say for certain we were twelve and it...
Alix Wood For months, we’ve planned to visit the New England Aquarium, where a new shark exhibit has opened. An open tank allows me to stick my hand in cold water and let it float, waiting for sharks the length of thigh bone to emerge from faux coral and swim. You watch me as a thin body crowds my...
