When you tell me to run, I can’t help but wonder if you really mean me or the busy blue heron to the right of me, its neck like an enchanted oboe charming the residents of the river where fish swarm in wild despair—because surely this danger is a farce, surely not all gators bite. To the insect...
Gallery
Hunger
I was a gluttonous child. From their first tentative offerings of pap, my parents knew I wanted more. They could see it in the way I grabbed at the spoon and the bowl, the way my nostrils flared and I screeched when they were not ready with the next bite. They discarded The Common Sense Book of...
Short Turn
fog swirls in my water ~ glass ~ rain hashtags the window ~ heaven ~ was closer to earth ~ in ancient Greece ~ goddesses wore the same cloaks as us ~ strolling in marketplaces ~ pulling lightning from pockets ~ in the shape of windflowers ~ aster and iris as currency ~ to pay for pomegranate ~...
shapeless paradox & kay’s hope passed away
Kay Kassirer (they/them) is a white queer poet whose autobiographical work focuses on grief, disability, and sex work. Kay curated and edited A Whore’s Manifesto: An Anthology of Writing and Artwork by Sex Workers published by Thornapple Press. Their work can be found in Frontier, Foglifter, Button...
What Is and Is Not Ours: A Review of My Thievery of the People by Leila Marshy
Reviewed by Anne Perdue Leila Marshy, My Thievery of the People (Baraka Books, 2025), 185 pp., $24.95. In Leila Marshy’s The Philistine, (LLP, 2018)—a novel that explores issues of hereditary and sexual identity—a Palestinian-Canadian woman travels to Egypt in search of her father and falls in love...
I don’t keep blood in my beer
I used to go dancing at the Painted Lady I used to go dancing in the afternoon lazily drinking youth and afraid of nothing but afraid of nothing except missing cheap oysters When the beer I tasted really mattered and how I tasted the beer I tasted really mattered When it mattered that the appetizer...