after Eleanor Wikstrom & while writing this, mā, i am still learning how your absencebites my body bare under yellowed street lamps,carves tragedy or myth or memory out of a girl’s womb. mā, is this thedistance between girl & womanhood? tonight, against the cold- faced concrete, i sketch the city skyline, traceevery path we took down the alleys. […]
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7/19: The Seventh Wave is currently open for previously unpublished poetry, flash fiction, flash CNF, short screenplays, hybrid, interactive works, and visual art for its On Gaming anthology. Prose submissions can be up to 3,000 words, and up to 4 poems/pieces of art per submission. In your submission, include your full name, email address, a […]
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Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Sex Goblin by Lauren Cook As if hauled up squirming from the bowels of the internet, Sex Goblin metabolizes sex writing, popular culture, and autofiction to present the real and the imagined as equally surreal possibilities. In the narrator’s childlike voice, all things become both mundane […]
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“Lived and died a fat seven inches from your closet / toe. The gray heads of rainwater blown in. I / fought my own omens, their circles” (Moore 1). And so begins Iva Moore’s debut chapbook, Women Collapse into Better, Brighter Artists, a work that deftly examines gendered identity and relationships, womanhood as an inherently […]
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This month’s artist, Lucy Liu, captures a tender and powerful moment between a mother and daughter with her piece, Holding On. Liu shares her artistic journey and gives us insight as to how she uses painting and drawing to explore her imagination and express her emotions. You’ve mentioned you started learning art at a very young age, […]
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Once upon a time there was a great and powerful king. When he first assumed control of the kingdom, after his father the previous king passed away, life for the people wasn’t so good. They went hungry most of the time, food and clean water were scarce, and nice houses only existed in dreams. The king’s subjects were […]
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I live in a temple, and you live in a house. When you visit me, you run slender fingers across my shrine. I don’t know how to respond to this. I’ve been alone for three hundred years and I’m dusty and small. I want to ask you to stop kissing my feet but the words […]
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We have a new opening for one volunteer position: CNF Editor. See below for application details. Please note: all staff positions are volunteer and are thus unpaid. All positions are also virtual/remote. CNF Editor (Posted June 17, applications will be accepted until position is filled) Each month, VC features one CNF author as a part […]
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Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Discovery by Dee Allen In New York City during the Truman years, two photographers met and worked with their greatest discovery – a blue-eyed, fresh-faced brunette from Nashville who stepped before their cameras, bound to change the game. The poems in Discovery – Oakland performance poet […]
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flowers froth-blooming:carmine and daffodil, orchid and violetgreen glimmering alien iridescenceautumn winding throughthe karmic wheel, edifice of lifestraddling life, the earthbleeding earth, briefcracking clouds, a secondlate blooming still alivelate but not too late. nourishing the bones of my quiet aether behindthe ginkgo tree, kicking crabapples asidejoy, resurrection, andfaeries made from pegs withclear gray eyesthe children of […]
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We hurt people that love usLove people that hurt usWe say we want to date our best friendAnd end up dating someone we are afraid our friends will hateI think I can collapse everything to rules and principlesI live in a world of impressions and outlinesEveryone is a representation of their identitiesWhen I overhear conversations […]
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after Ilya Kaminsky Gabrielle Bonifacio is a wistful Media Studies graduate with a minor in German and playlist-making. She writes in the hope of liberation and safety for all peoples, from Palestine to the Philippines. Her work has most recently appeared in thewildnessjournal.
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Last week, I couldn’t afford therapy,so I bought flowers instead.Ranunculi and roses, fern and blazing star.A modest bouquet of beauty,beholden only to the breeze between.Unlike me—modernity’s stupid bride.Wringing my dread, counting my debt.It’s endless, endless. Dial a friend,thread our lament. We pledge allegiance todespair, we drown in ocean breath.On a walk toward nowhere, my mom […]
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Sundress is currently looking for Editorial Interns for the Sundress Academy for the Arts and Sundress Publications. The internship for Sundress Publications will be remote while the internship for the Sundress Academy for the Arts will take place in Knoxville, TN. To apply, please send a resume and a brief cover letter detailing your interest […]
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Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators NDA by Lily Lady NDA by poet and filmmaker Lily Lady is an intimate and opaque poetry collection about [REDACTED] and [REDACTED]. Spiral upward, downward, and side to side. From the safe words of New York to the alleys of Los Angeles….and all the flights in […]
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In plastic chairs over fake grassconvenience store sangriapoured over icecheers to summer and your newjob I’ll miss you in the officemiss walking home with you toour respective homeslaughing next you’re shoutingat the man above in hisapartment who yelled downthat he didn’t like ushe was drunkyour laugh you sawthe ridiculousness in everythingand when the police cameyou […]
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To do it again,I’d go stream rock rural.and walk the vast county fields. I’d look at trash.The useless itemsthat people throw from cars.And I’d be happy about it.A slow country happy.One withoutthe fear of carelessness. I’d stop for a diner lunchand a filling station sodastraight from the ice chest. Most of all,I’d listen to the […]
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after Daniel Mallory Ortberg “God blessed me by making me transsexual for the same reason God made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine, so that humanity might share in the act of creation” and here i amstaring at the crease in my elbow like i used to stare at hisand wondering what […]
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Through sinuous fields of color and vibrant textures, Nicole F. Kimball’s striking paintings stand out as creative exercises in emotional exploration. The fluidity and shifting forms of her abstract work contrasts the solid, geometric brush strokes and pensive landscapes of her more figurative pieces. This month, Kimball discusses the importance of art, human creativity, and […]
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A first impression: the poems seem so impersonal as to be deeply personal. Words that resonate: sun, meadow, redemption, tomorrow, promise and…what else? Wandering and moon. A Long Walk is birth and death, fate and will, time and love. Spare, essential, intimate, each poem takes on a personality. Picture a human figure crossing an inner landscape. One thing common […]
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IMAGE NO. 1+2 + MONOLOGUE NO. 1+2: Alt Text: My first lesbian experience was with the sun. My eye stared at it for a whole minute—a hole was bored into my eyesight. There was no solar eclipse or anything—no reason to stare. Nobody there. Two dusts: fairy dust and black salt. Black salt for cleansing. […]
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Brooklyn Poets Poetry Festival Fellowships is currently accepting registration fellowship applications from people who are not enrolled in a degree program with access to creative writing instruction or have had a book of poems published or accepted for publication by a United States press for their second annual poetry festival. To apply, submit 4–5 poems […]
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Rebecca Stoner was born and raised in New York, and spent six years living in Chicago. An MFA candidate at Rutgers University-Newark, her work is forthcoming in the Black Warrior Review and Palindrome.
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I had accepted that I would never see you againbefore you ever died. Still air, or was the fan turning?You asked what you were seeing when there was nothing to see.Animals at the end of your hospital bed, but whatkind? I have never been good at seeing what is not there,much less what is. A […]
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Thistle Dunsmuir is a non-binary writer and editor from the West Coast of Canada. Their work focuses on themes of queerness and neurodiversity, celebrating and exploring their identities of autistic, non-binary, aromantic, and asexual. These identities provide them with a fresh perspective on the world, which they explore deeply in their works. They can be […]
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Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Crimson Stain: Poems Inspired by King’s letter from jail, Real Life & a Facet of Blood Diamond Culture by Dee Allen In Winter 2007, a full-time college student broke 7 years of writer’s block by writing a new poem, generated while reading Martin Luther King’s Letter […]
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I was interested in this hybrid collection because of its fluid approach towards the concepts of gender and genre. I have a cursory understanding of some of the “inherited rage of South Asian women” that Sindu writes of, as I grew up in Southeast Asia and have some knowledge of associated cultural experiences and expectations, so […]
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IMAGE NO. 1: Alt Text: Picture of the beach. At the top center of the image is an airplane that is about to land at the airport. Directly under it is a black sun that is rising over some hilly islands that block the view into the open ocean. At the bottom of the image […]
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I think I am drinking spit. I can feel it on my tongue, just that bit thicker than water, sliding down my throat like egg white. Gabrielle is banging her palm on the sticky table, repeating the start of a drinking chant we all know, in a tone that is slightly too aggressive for 7am. […]
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Small Harbor Publishing is accepting chapbook submissions for The Marginalia Series. Chapbooks should be written by traditionally marginalized writers, be between 20-40 pages and include a title page, table of contents, and a list of acknowledgments for previously published poems (the collection as a whole must be unpublished). Deadline: March 31st. Hub City Press is […]
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Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators The Sadness of Shadows by Lola Ancira (translated by Juana Adcock) Lola Ancira’s third short story collection, and the first to be translated into English, gives voice to those who have been marginalised and condemned to live life in the shadows of lunacy, nostalgia, loss and […]
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Occupying the tenebrous space between dreams and memories, the collages of JC Alfier (they/them) are at once intimate and mysterious; universal and obscure; conscious and unconscious. Evoking both the ubiquity and elusiveness of Jungian archetypes, this poetic opposition between the known and the unknown is brought to mind in La ville qui regarde II – The […]
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The sonnet, as a traditional poetic form, has often been used by writers as a means for depicting and paying homage to a beloved. And, given the enduring presence of the sonnet within poetry, it should be no surprise then that many (from Renaissance writers to the Romantics to our contemporaries) have used, broken, and […]
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A man of God told me once that self-mythologizing is the greatest sin. He asked me what I prayed for and I could not answer, from my paper mouth. It became a fig tree, blossoming, rooting me in depth and height distractions. The fig tree was God but the tree was me but the tree […]
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I can’t remember how long it’s beensince I’ve sung a whole song, painted a whole picture, written a poem wholeenough to make me love who I am & all the while, my throat is fullof broken notes small blue-winged swallows. They stab at flesh […]
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It starts with crickets. We lie in the forest and she sings about colors. Silver and purple at twilight, rubies of emerald glowing. There is nothing to back her voice, only crickets. The words echo and the moon fills up her lungs. Sunlight comes in shafts during the day, she reminds us as we watch […]
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How could the moon have been likenedto cheese—wedge?—hardly appropriate.Possessing the delicacy of an orphanedeyelash, a demure sun-inspired stature,the moon is perfectly placed, not forced. Why was that easier to write than the title? It’s not that I’m bored of Ode to the Moonbut why would I read it when I can readOde to his Five […]
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Audrey T. Carroll is the author of What Blooms in the Dark (ELJ Editions, 2024), Parts of Speech: A Disabled Dictionary (Alien Buddha Press, 2023), and In My Next Queer Life, I Want to Be (kith books, 2023). Her writing has appeared in Lost Balloon, CRAFT, JMWW, Bending Genres, and others. She is a bi/queer/genderqueer […]
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watching a YouTuberdocument the history of Minecraft speedrunning. another day my date tells mea dream of studyingfilm archival workso she canpreserve porn. we go to a museumof postersand learn about a viral ad campaignthat predates my birth. i am transported. my primary partner describesan appalachian horror podcast i keep meaning to listen toand we watch […]
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For now the sun cliche-like has risenin full view of my living. For now our cats lean and rub live-bodied my feetas light opens slow to the room where I feed them enough to help them remain.For now I forget slash set aside this need to close forever slash I mouth phrasesand none are for […]
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Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Yaguareté White by Diego Báez In Diego Báez’s debut collection, Yaguareté White, English, Spanish, and Guaraní encounter each other through the elusive yet potent figure of the jaguar. The son of a Paraguayan father and a mother from Pennsylvania, Baéz grew up in central Illinois as […]
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As compelling as the richly symbolic, saturated artwork that graces its front cover, Jen Yáñez-Alaniz’s admittedly slim (but no less emotionally packed) debut chapbook, Surrogate Eater, is one not to miss. Part-critique of the gendered roles expected of the speaker, part-reclamation of the speaker’s sexual identity, Yáñez-Alaniz’s chapbook is not so much a read but […]
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A girl, let’s call her Fashion, invited me over to meet her hamster. The hamster lived in a large clear plastic box, like a large storage container, but it had no top. At first, this startled me. Where was the top? Then I remembered hamsters couldn’t fly. This hamster lived in its plastic house without […]
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Lately I have stopped being able to recognize my face as a sum of its parts. When I stand in front of the mirror, pinching soft skin between accusatory fingers, the face that looks back is unrecognizable, each feature isolated like pieces of a disjointed puzzle. My reflection smiles at me and parts her lips, […]
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Kirsten Smith is a photographer, writer, and travel addict who lives and works in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in (or will soon appear in) SPANK the CARP, Esoterica Magazine, JAKE the Magazine, and Cosmic Daffodil. Check her out on Instagram @the_wallflower_wanderer and Twitter @Kirsten_Wanders.
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After Alessia Di Cesare the pine trees stayed the same shade of green and the thing is that i love you again.it’ that it hangs in my throat until we have glitter on our feet and sand in our eyes.that it was me breaking sticks and watching you shoot arrows, that i tried to tell […]
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Michal (Mitak) Mahgerefteh is an ESL poet and artist based in Virginia. She is the managing editor at Poetica Publishing, where she oversees the Miriam Rachimi Micro Chapbook Poetry Prize. Mahgerefteh has authored five poetry chapbooks, including In My Bustan, The Rising Song, What’s Left Behind, Field of Harps, and Sipping Memories. Her latest collection, FishMoon, will be released in 2024. In addition to […]
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after Jenny Tiskus The first day with the stethoscopethe thought of eyes catchingon my buzzed head and refusingto let me listen to the child’s heartbeatlands like a winch hook behind mysternum, reeling me up and awayfrom the rancid culture simmeringin parental guts before I can evenpress the tiny belly, find the hurt.Years on I am […]
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Dingzhong Ding (he/him) is a writer from Shanghai, China. His work has been recognized by the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and Yale Young Writers’ Workshop. You can find him on Instagram @ddzhxng.
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Content warning: Mentions of sexual harassment and rape. No one warned me about boys. In Grade 6, I was ill-prepared when a group of them took my backpack and tossed it in the boy’s bathroom. My textbooks and notebooks were wet from whatever was leaking under the urinals. They locked me in as soon as […]
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VAGABOND CITY 