every morning, it sings – but it is not pretty: bird’s nestinstead of hair, purple accordions lacerating the thighs. if icould make a wish: winged, angelic, anything but the meat. one slight adrenal mis-calculation leadingto rogue, to roam, to in-visibly dis-abled: if my mother had known. had slept on it. but imperfectly to perceive, to […]
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there is the world and there you arein it. tired for years. you drive northeaston a cloudy midmorning. the air hangsheavy around the car. the car hangsheavy in the air and clings to its staticframe. space sinks and stretches. onceyou were a child, you imagined your adultbody. the space between your eyes anddangling feet. the […]
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button upOil on canvas Introduction I think for any creative, world-building is a big undertaking that pushes the limits of creativity. Thinking expansively to create an environment, society, and characters that serve a purpose to explore that world is a continual showcase of imaginative prowess. When that process comes together it creates a rich, imaginative […]
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Gender, addiction, and motherhood elicit spiritual visions of both pain and euphoria in Sara Moore Wagner’s poetry collection Hillbilly Madonna (Driftwood Press, November 2022). Girlhood and Change The collection begins with “Fit to be Tied,” where two girls sit outside on a summer night, dreaming of what lies ahead. They know change is coming, but […]
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Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators A Queen in Bucks County by Kay Gabriel In A Queen in Bucks County, our protagonist Turner, who both is and is not the writer, makes his pleasurable way through miserable space. Men “buy him things,” lovers drive across state lines, users down volatile cocktails to […]
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Mizna Journal: “Mizna is a critical platform for contemporary literature, film, art, and cultural production centering the work of Arab and Southwest Asian and North African artists … Contributors do not need to identify as of Arab/SWANA descent, provided their work is of relevance to or in dialogue with the social realities of the SWANA/Arab […]
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It’s a very practical form of self-harm, I say reasonably. Sensibly. My voice is measured, even chipper. It’s free, easy, quiet, and leaves no physical trace…what more can you ask for? I sound like a salesperson on commission. You hate me for it. My grin grows wider without mirth, like a fox baring its fangs. […]
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The marks appeared overnight. I was drinking microwaved coffee in the kitchen when Brady emerged from our bedroom, pajama bottoms hanging off his hips. His mark sat, prominent, on his naked shoulder. “What’s that?” “What’s what?” “There’s something on your shoulder.” It stayed when I went to wipe it away, and the colour didn’t change […]
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Years ago I was walking through a building at my university and found an abandoned copy of An Introduction to Symbolic, 3rd Edition by Susanne K. Langer. I love a free book, so I had to take it. The book really intrigued me since I had no clue what “Symbolic Logic” even was. I learned […]
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Your eyes are the soil around a depressed white root. Nematodes will eat you out of the bathroom mirror when you feel quiet and laboured and you want less nights. Work a fingertip into the dirt and tell me, what is alive? And you know it is everything. Even you. Just as there is always […]
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In this once-was of gardens and succulents behaving madly, who has the ability to call themselves delighted? I want to be variegated with leaves so new I’ll turn to deer and eat my own tenderness. In this difference of Sundays, I want to hear—a molten of gospel, among tuft-y grassesand yellow irises. All chanting in shapes […]
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Eleven, that’s all you’ll ever be.Dark-haired kid holding your face downin a pool, howling Don’t touch me, faggot.Sounds like Touch me, faggotin a world of burning water. Thirteen, eat a weak punch to the teeth, let himlick away the hurt, tell him you’re sorry you didn’t make it more believable.Mud gritting your mouth, pinned to the […]
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I’ve always known too much, bornadherent I entered the world with a shavingof my mother’s hippocampus curvingagainst my palm. I urge / I warn / I caution:it’s dying, it’s gasping for water.This is a family of burdened women. These bodies won’t make it to 30. This is the beginning of genealogy, of lineage, of a door with a […]
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Back when I was urging my heart to flow into slow circles, Grace parked her old, blue convertible across the street and met me at the front door of my apartment building. We stood there, smiled, moved into some sort of embrace we hadn’t fully formed, and I followed her back down the steps. She […]
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For a moment after my mother closed the bathroom door, I stood on the other side, listening. Water was rushing into the tub. I pictured my mother stepping out of her pink house slippers, her blue skirt, taking off her gold jewelry and laying them by the soap dish. After the faucet turned off, I […]
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“Tenderness is the impulse to protect what you know you could destroy,” is an early line in Maya Marshall’s debut full-length poetry collection, All the Blood Involved in Love. Tenderness—gentleness, affection—also a sensitivity to pain. With immense care Marshall hollows out a world of tenderness in three acts, shifting across black motherhood and daughterhood, our […]
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Steven Reigns’ newest poetry book, A Quilt for David, documents the story surrounding David Johnson Acer. If you are aware of David at all, you may know him by the label he received: “The AIDS Dentist.” You may be more familiar with his accuser, Kimberly Bergalis, the “young HIV-positive woman in Florida [who] claimed she […]
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Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators space neon neon space by luna rey hall space neon neon space is a striking collection on the body. luna’s voice is strong & momentous, and explores language with movement that will give you shivers! PTSD Poems to Slay Demons by Robin L Harvey Author Robin […]
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Drizzle Review: “We are open to submissions all year long! We exclusively publish reviews, essays, and interviews that celebrate marginalized writers. Our reviews cover work by authors who are: Black, Indigenous, people of color, LGBTQIA+, women, disabled, chronically ill, rural and economically disenfranchised.” No fee. EMERGENT LITERARY: “an assemblage of black and brown work. For […]
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The sun was warm and terrible—too strong for mid-March.I basked in it anyway, enamored with the way it hit your clavicleand just below. Daffodils sprungup around us—I did not mention their prematurity, but plucked oneand tucked it gently in the lipof your jeans with eager fingers. You kissed me, lips hot and wetas the air. […]
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hypothesis: ur seeing moons in the face of the moon. yeah every nite is full w/ ur moon in the face of another man. oh he the Dreamworks logo. he hooked. he dipping his toes into ur ribs. in the morning ur blanket is a milky cloud. a rabbit humping another rabbit. ur toes scare […]
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Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Togetherness by Wo Chan Togetherness sends out sparks from its electric surface, radiating energy and verve from within its deep and steady emotional core: stories of the poet’s immigrant childhood spent in their family’s Chinese restaurant, culminating in a deportation battle against the State. These narrative threads […]
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Art:Dirty Laundry pt 2. by Amy Chu (Issue 68)Pup at the End of the World (Burning Field) by Ben Herbert (Issue 72) CNF:Dear Mummiji by Bhumika Muchhala (Issue 66)Wash N Ride: A Teen’s Quest for Power and Identity by Jess Moor (Issue 71) Fiction:The Most Beautiful Things Could End Us by Zach Murphy (Issue 68)After […]
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Every poem is a bodyof water. It will ferryyou across your fear. Javeria Hasnain is an incoming MFA student at The New School on a Fulbright scholarship. Sheis a Pakistani poet whose work can be found in AAWW’s The Margins, Gutter magazine,Superstition Review, Stone, and elsewhere.
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Marrying contemporary chaos with the imagery found on his phone screen, Yuyang Zhang (he/him) is an image-maker with a distinct “tongue-in-cheek” point of view. Yuyang’s inspiration and imagery comes far and wide: Chinese propaganda posters, Marvel’s television series WandaVision, iPhone emojis, or his love of sports cars. In this interview, we talk about his image […]
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There’s a look Dallas gets on his face when he’s about to lose his shit. His lip curls, his eyeballs shake inside their sockets, and it makes you wonder: is this really a four-year-old boy and not some Antichrist birthed from a jackal and hidden amongst human children with the aim of mankind’s eventual destruction? […]
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1 Mythology My mother emails me a study on the correlation between rain and depression. I email back and promise to be alert, hand over heart. I stay wary of it. I kill every cloud I see. In winter a storm lets itself in anyways, petulant, sticking to the roof of my mouth for nights […]
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Ever since Hu and Javed and I started making music together, I’ve been trying to tease apart whether Noor’s sense of humor is obligatory-host-dad, ingratiated-Midwestern-sarcastic, or something else entirely. It can’t possibly be Pakistani, can it? Late yesterday afternoon he greeted me with a stonefaced stare: “You are not welcome here.” He didn’t crack a […]
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Perhaps you’ve seen me in Central Park, a tall, white-haired woman in an emerald green polo shirt with a rectangular logo and the kind of khaki shorts made popular during the Raj. My official uniform and photo ID confirm my skill as a volunteer tour guide. I greet visitors from around the world. Most are […]
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I’ve always seen art as a way to get to know people. Interpretations of work and approaches to artistic practice being a great conversation to understand the intimacies of a creative’s mind beyond talking about the weather. When I met this month’s spotlighted artist, Juan Astudillo, we were doing an artist residency in New York […]
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The boy and I make nicebecause there’s too much sufferingand send messages through the flight patternsof migratory birdsand when his answers cawat my window I open it upand cut cloacas in my breaststo let thefat outand I tell him “I’ll get you your surgery somedayI promise”and he says “black feathers blue feathers south.” Noelle McManus […]
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(a poem made from my 2006 myspace blog post) Suzy is a writer from Arizona. She lives in Seattle. Her work is published in Rejection Letters, South Dakota Review, Variant Lit, Monkeybicycle, and others. She’s a recent graduate of Lindenwood University’s MFA program. She’s on Twitter @suzyeynon
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I have forgotten how to sing.At CVS, I impulse buy two bottlesof cherry syrup. Ten percent off,I tell my mother, who shrieksMy god, how sick are you,by which she meanshow dead have you become.The only thing I rememberfrom biology is how to checkif something is alive.I should poke this poem withthe Big Dipper’s handleand watch […]
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I dream of Einstein and lightning describe the splintered tree to you over text how I saw the blitz coming before anyone else You write to me about space about time that gravity affects how the days slip away like a whale pulling […]
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Perugia Press Prize: “Perugia Press’s annual prize opens on August 1. Open to all who identify as women & who have not published more than one full-length book of poetry.” $1,000 prize. “Perugia Press asks poets to choose the submission rate that works for them: $30 (w/free book), $15 (reduced rate), or fee-free for poets […]
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Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Iguana Iguana by Caylin Capra-Thomas: Alive to the beauty and anxiety of new worlds and people, Iguana Iguana imagines a tough and tender soundtrack for tumbleweeds in search of roots. Recursive, deliberate, and as adaptive as their titular lizard, these poems invite us to listen so […]
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It was that time of the year in my city. Thunderstorm. Heavy rainfall. Violent winds. Blackout. While it brings inconvenience to most, for me, it happens to be the best time of the year. Nothing to distract me from reading. No Internet, no Netflix, no one to ask me for tea making favours and no […]
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Carnage, chaos, cuddling. This month’s artist interview is with Ben Herbert. Ben combines sculpture, collage, and photography to create a world all his own. One that involves pup-play, a burning landscape, and exploration of the human body. How would you describe yourself as an artist? Ben: I would describe myself as an artist, photographer, and […]
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I bought a fishing boat and sprinkled twelve life jackets around the deck. On the day of the tour, I wore a durian-patterned shirt with the Singapore Tourism Board logo on the breast pocket. Aaron, a bearded teenager with poop emoji earrings, shoved fifty dollars at me without asking for my license. “I study ancient […]
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once I was a fawn dipped in holy water.the forest my haven. the trees my family.the flowers my communion. the mist myprayer circle. the creek my rosary. the leaves whispering a promise of heaven. but only if I grew to be the kind of doe the forest wanted. all speckled with beguile and tame and meek. the kind who […]
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35mm the next time i take you to my parents’ house it’s better we leave the catholics out of it and i am at least three quarters of a person mom cooks & cooks hot chicken wings & honey garlic my sister’s favourite a […]
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Nancy Huang grew up in America and China. She is a Sewanee, VONA, Tin House, Watering Hole, and Pink Door fellow. Her debut poetry collection, Favorite Daughter, is out by Write Bloody Publishing. Her poetry, plays, and prose are published by The Offing, Cosmonauts Avenue, poets.org, The Margins, and film distribution company A24. She has […]
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& the other night you held a tree outside my apartment & you said it was perhaps the most huggable tree ever & my phone said it was an apple tree but i didn’t see any apples & tonight i am holding the same tree & it really is a good tree & it is […]
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How to Adjust to the Dark, a new novella by writer and editor Rebecca van Laer, begins in arather straightforward manner. In the first few pages, our narrator, Charlotte, explains themotivation behind the pages in front of us. After a long hiatus from writing, she has remainedunsure of what to do with her poetry, until […]
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Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators La Movida by Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta: Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta croons in the voice of a lovesick teenaged folklorist time traveler about revolution, housework, anti-colonialism, folk tales, post-punk, anti-fascism, anorexia, and alcoholism. Named both for the Chicana feminist concepts of revolutionary maneuvers and submerged technologies of struggle and the explosive […]
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Baest Journal: “a journal of queer forms & affects … all forms of submissions are welcome, including poetry, essays, reviews, (non)fictions, soundscapes, appendages of new media, monsters that could be called ‘theories,’ archives, past-and-present times, meanderings, hybrid beings, artistries, creations, excretions, hypnagogic ramblings, & whatever else seems fit to email to baestjournal@gmail.com.” No deadline. No fee. […]
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Birds dive for fish, backdropped by pinkhaze. I watch them disregard breaking wavesand sink shamelessly for what they want. Watermelon, two eggs, five dates. I runmy daily list of what I ate. A net negative,I decide. I roll over onto my stomach, eye-level with the sand. Crabs dartbetween holes. So tentative, they scareat the tapping […]
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yesterday, while lugging a box up the stairsto my new apartment, lungs aching in thestink of a hundred cracked and rotting pears soupy with august under their mother, green and sweetness-heavy. it once would’ve conjuredan image of us, older, in a perfect little domesticcountryside life somewhere, called to mind the songs about dizzying and soft love i collected […]
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I. My eyes have eyes and their eyes follow me everywhere. My shadow has a shadow, no matter how small and green. I have never been afraid to slip into the crowd inside a crowd, lose myself in between the teeming rush of people’s coats. To teeter on the edge of a platform to a platform just to feel the […]
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i smelled jasmine today – cut my lungs wide open. and yesterday, i swear, it was fresh pears on the tree outside my windowmonths too soon. i thought of the way they filled the basketon my bicycle as it leanedagainst the stairs. deflated tires and theache of uneaten fruit. i don’t know where i’ll be when they come again […]
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VAGABOND CITY 