my spine curved/ into a question mark, my pen sketching symptoms/ on an empty man's silhouette.
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Diana's Chin by Taylor Arnette
You’d paid the fourteen dollars (plus tax and service fees), sure that it was going to be in the main theater with the red fabric seats and gold façades on the ceiling. It made you feel classic. Instead, you sat in what could have been someone’s at-home projector room with ten other people, all waiting to watch a biopic about Princess Diana.
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When I Couldn’t Look at Myself in the Mirror, My Friend Looked for Me by Shifra Sharlin and Carol Troen
On the other hand, I hated the port. It turned me into a cancer machine. It frightened me, too. I couldn’t look at it. So I asked Carol to make a portrait.
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A Review of My Birth Control Methods by Victoria Buitron
I didn’t know there would be anesthesia. I didn’t know there would be blood. I didn’t know my arm would bruise Rorschach. I didn’t know the army greens and deep blues would last so long.
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A Normal Interview with SJ Sindu by Nicholas Howard
I think it’s important for writers to rediscover wonder. Without wonder, writing becomes stagnant and preachy. If you haven’t found your place of wonder yet, think about the kinds of spaces that make you ask questions, that make you see in a new way.
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A Normal Interview with K-Ming Chang by Yia Lee
I think part of writing into myth and folklore is that there’s this kind of cosmic presence, this feeling that people are people, but they’re also more than people in a way. There’s something about them that is incredibly ancient and powerful.
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A Cement Mother by Elizabeth Brus
On the toilet, a new mother discovers her head is full of cement. She drips red and yellow, squirts herself with water and lidocaine, and feels the wet cement chunks coating her throat and lapping the backs of her eye sockets.
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Elegy / Eulogy / Ode by Lacey N. Dunham
For months now, you have not been able to walk through the daily din into the madness, and your life has felt more textured, your days fuller, though you will not admit that you might be happier this way.
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A Normal Interview with Dustin Prestridge, Kimiko Hahn, and Marisol Baca by Kirk Alvaro Lua
Poets are all of us — poet and not poet — building a bridge of poems with our hearts and minds and hands and languages.
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Two Poems by Leah Claire Kaminski
Now that I’ve stopped, I have more time to think about things like rocks, slightly less for thinking about self-loathing.
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Ovary-Acting by Melinda Scully
The metal tube growls around you like a mechanical dragon with an empty belly. A voice over the intercom reminds you not to shiver as you’re being digested.
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Sowing Ground by Elliot Alpern
Can you believe it’s been five years? It’s still so vivid to me. But look, just look, everything changes. Regrows, right? Like it was yesterday and a hundred years ago.
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The Back of the Cereal Box by Jennifer Fliss
At the bottom of the box, amidst the impossibly small pearls of sugar and sharp crumbs, you will never find what you are looking for. Nothing will make you see things differently. But you will never stop searching.
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Fireflies by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
I know I will search for fireflies all the rest of my days, even though they dwindle a little more each year. I can’t help it. They blink on and off, a lime glow to the summer night air, as if to say: I am still here, you are still here…
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A Normal Interview with Ira Sukrungruang by Melinda Medeiros
Something that I’ve really had to tell myself when writing this book was: You have to rip the Band-Aid off. You have to look at the wound for what it is. The genre of memoir—as hard as it sounds—thrives on suffering and it lives on vulnerability.
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There is Always More by Ahsan Butt
As the credits rolled, Dad was leaned forward on his crossed leg, rubbing where his forehead touches the mat in prayer—that’s what it is: man becomes animal when death comes.
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Stinktown by Matthew Goldberg
In Stinktown, we scavenged for trash. That was our big industry. We’d sift through huge mounds of garbage, searching for stuff we could use for trading purposes.
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A Normal Interview with Kelly Gray by Shelby Pinkham
If I can line up visuals that allow you to connect to your grief, your anger, and imagine an alternative life force, while allowing you your own autonomy in thought, that feels far more consensual than me telling you what you should see, feel, do.
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No Country for Daughters by Sarah Twombly
They say this is the age of monster hunting, and we are the monsters: mothers and daughters, heroines and crones. The stench of us riles them. The sight of us sets them to howling.
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Two Poems by Lily Rose Kosmicki
A satisfied end eludes me / The hysteria of locution becomes me / Charred brain crowded and crowned / with fleshy angles feeding / of the mouthparts, crazed
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