cooling my burned thumb at the kitchen tap I’d grasped the roasting stick too high up cold water rushing over the raw spot farther down the stream rinsing yellow plum the neighbour brought over tasting the sour water eye always wander out I kept this in a box, snug I pull the lid off and it rises...
Reviewed by Michaela Stephen Natalie Wee, Beast at Every Threshold (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022), 104 pp., $17.95. In her sophomore poetry collection Beast at Every Threshold (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022), Natalie Wee offers an exploration of desire, grief, and history with evocative, sensual, and...
When I say strangle I don’t mean the hands that crush the throat, but the body that won’t resist, confident in its ability to hold its breath, or not. There are nights when I wake up choking because my body wills itself to stop breathing. Tolerates few terrors of murderers or other lovers— silent...
1. Our favorite part of the zoo was the aquarium. We were both scared of water. Never swam or got close to the beach. Being blue-skinned between the water tanks got us close as we ever got to being fish. Me and Jack. I remember, we found the ugliest fish we could that reminded us of each other. He...
and i’ve killed my tomatoes. their long arms crack, despite the butchness of my shoulders. they insist on death with unrelenting life. my girlfriend and i are gay on main street, in the vintage shop where i bought my first men’s shirt, the one i wore to my second pride, when i blacked out in a west...
shore nursing rubble water scraping brick teeth carmines, umbers urban abscess, coaxed into gaze by strings of 8 o’clock light an invitation to squint. ombak, waves me sand-laden, dragging teenage feet through coast, dark and happy grinning at the sight of Makku, my mother always perched on a...
Jo wakes up with a lump on her throat. Not in, but on. She sees it first in the bathroom mirror as her face fades into view through the steam from the shower. It’s about the size of a marble, gelatinous in consistency. When she touches it, she feels it move slightly beneath the skin. Lucille comes...
I am Charles Darwin. I eat owlflesh at Cambridge University. I have discovered something, an entirely new species with tropical fever in its reptile fingers. I am busy with taxonomying its most peculiar and three-sided armor, its six-toed fitness for these latitudes and its perfect speckled eggs...
I am told these are among the most dangerous tides in the world. I come from a country with dangerous tides, but only in theory: I am not familiar with that pull. I would not know what to avoid, so I pick my way across, nearest the shore, my soles sucked down, thinking of opaque glass and broken...
