Toxicon and Arachne, the recent poetry collection by Joyelle McSweeney, depicts the short human lifespan with an unconventional consistent darkness. Uniquely refreshing in its morbidity, this work is scattered with the bitterness of losing a child, and McSweeney portrays her grief “the way a crane / dances for its mate / the awkward body / […]
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Pervertere As soon as the day is extinguished and Night fills the sky with mirages the bells of evil begin to toll announcing the sins of the world. To such a mournful song dance thousands of creatures about to satisfy their appetite. They bellow, wail, and slither, vermin in heat: insatiable, frenetic, possessed. Hedonism fornicates […]
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HornyTopNow proposes a sexorcism in your DMs when he writes: let me fuck the hell out of you He must think his penis is God’s gift if he can save you from damnation, but you don’t believe him. You’re atheist & to you, angels are just a slutty Halloween costume. If there is a devil, […]
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after “Poem After Reading the Chapter in Stephen King’s It Where the Word ‘Kike’ Appears Six Times” by Hannah Cohen, “gelato” by Matt Mitchell, & “in lieu of a poem, i’d like to say” by Danez Smith the adriatic sea is a body of water, so etymologically i am born from pockets of salt / […]
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“why am I growing out of myself” and the opening songis a gunshot wound that never closes up and inside exists a portal to thirteen where the slashed armstill bleeds black, drips until tar becomes speed bump but we have already tripped over the casualties ofgrowing up too fast and there are no longer picnics […]
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you tell me ice wants to be warm. a television screen, spastic with tiny spines,warm from my fingerprint smeared across its face. i do this to you, but i am not pricked. before work, a bundle of coriander stripped by the night’s wind on the porch-step.once, when little, i constructed a fence from the broken […]
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Georgie Wileman, born in 1988, is a British photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her photographic projects document intimate experiences of pain and social injustice: with THIS IS ENDOMETRIOSIS, she demystifies a still misunderstood illness which she’s suffered from her entire life, while To Thy Own Self Be True denounces the dehumanization of transgender people […]
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George Abraham spoke with VCL’s Michelle Betters in early May about their first full-length collection of poems, BIRTHRIGHT. In the words of Naomi Shihab Nye, this is a “sizzling, flaring” book that merits multiple readings. But it’s also, as George explains below, a hot mess of prose, traditional poetry forms, erasure, and ekphrasis. In other […]
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