Issues

with Images & Phrases from Shakespeare’s sonnets  for C.M. Nathan Erwin is a land-based poet who was raised on the Allegheny Plateau, the northernmost tier of Appalachia. An IAF and Harvard-trained organizer, Erwin currently operates at Boston Medical Center to prevent overdose deaths and at the Pocasset Pokanoket Land Trust building healthy futures for farmers and […]

The cedar chest lives in the living room. I am six, cracking its polished skull open to the lightasking Mom why it smells so funny—               Cedar protects the delicates               like fabrics and old papers from being eaten by moths                keeps everything dry from mold, fungus, oils, fumes.       You know this part in the story. She doesn’t come back.  A […]

it’s wild that some homophobes think                 queerness emerges from a lack                   a victim chalk outline where              some better dad should be                    where pavement collects and       america is a freedom ambulance stuck    in freedom traffic               bald eagle tears    rotten apple    in this scenario only one can live           a broken […]

You are ghost to me, caught in the rectangleOf progress, the YouTubification of socialInteraction, fitting for a boy (a man) withoutTheory of mind. Numbed to commands of tooMany metal mothers, you become request-makingMachine; I, your playlist, the half hour between startStop. Repeated as if start was Center and center|Everything. Same songs sung into the wishingWeal […]

Nathan Erwin is a land-based poet who was raised on the Allegheny Plateau, the northernmost tier of Appalachia. An IAF and Harvard-trained organizer, Erwin currently operates at Boston Medical Center to prevent overdose deaths and at the Pocasset Pokanoket Land Trust building healthy futures for farmers and land stewards. His writing has most recently appeared in Ninth […]

Brianna Cunliffe is an environmental justice activist and storyteller. As a queer woman who grew up on a disintegrating Carolina coastline, her work explores fiercely loving the fragile places we call home. Her poems and short stories have been published in Reckoning Magazine, Bell Press, Lucent Dreaming, Storm Cellar, Claw and Blossom, Blind Corner, and […]

Trichophagia / but they never called it that / just a bad habit / just a phase / just / she’s a kid / but in flashbulb, hindsight imagination  I think / someone probably should have cared / a little more / that I was eating my own hair / gnawing on the ends like […]

On February 13th, 2019, the rover named “Opportunity” went offline after fifteen years of exploring Mars. In goodbye, a final transmission was sent: Billie Holiday’s 1944 recording of “I’ll Be Seeing You.” In the aftermath of a dust stormyour grey body stilled with all the grace of a dogthat dozes inside only the red ghosts […]

after Sreshtha Sen in another life, my hand grips my belly, my other hand an extension of my cell phone, lights flashing in my pupils. nine months will be preserved in my phone’s gallery, waiting to be posted in a carousel. five years pass by and i smile at my daughter circling on a metal horse, bobbing to calliope songs, my camera too […]