He is a biology or criminal justice major. I don’t know if he thinks about me outside of class. He writes fiction that destroys me. “I really like your assignments,” he says to me the fourth class of the semester. “Thank you,” I say, cordially. “The semester has only just started.” He is 18, and […]
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beloved(s)! plz clink ur glasses w/ me! today is my 25th birthday. today is always my last birthday. today is X-mas. today is Yom Kippur. today is Columbus Day. today is a day of celebration. how else to consider life w/o joy? no. ur probs right: the big dipper is scoopin all the stars 2nite […]
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Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Common Life by Stéphane Bouquet (translated by Lindsay Turner) In three poems, one play, and three short stories, Stéphane Bouquet’s Common Life offers a lively, searching vision of contemporary life, politics, and sociality. At a moment at which the fabric of everyday social life is increasingly threatened […]
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Cipher Press is looking for book-length adult fiction and creative non-fiction submissions from both agented and unagented authors who identify as LGBTQI+. Send all submissions to both jack [at] cipherpress.co.uk and ellis [at] cipherpress.co.uk with the subject line Submission: fiction, Submission: non-fiction, or Submission: poetry. Deadline: March 31st A Public Space Writing Fellowships is open for […]
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What does space travel look like from a human perspective? Not: marvel at the technological achievements of humanity, but: what are the day-to-day, boots-on-the-zero-gravity lives of people in space? What new problems arise, and how much of the same old complaints about how bad the coffee at work is will follow us beyond the asteroid […]
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Tears and sadness feared, Tried to veer, but we need to steer, Still in steering the sadness leers, Sometimes it’s difficult to face sadness, but drawing and reflecting on the puddles muddles the uncertainty, Something which words can’t fully explain and others cant see, This is my drawing, my expressions of this feeling, Though many […]
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Dinosaur egg rocks, clefts and declivities. Virga daubs sky over mesa achingly. Acid-green lichen. I long to be the sun’s last rake through your hair. Candace Walsh is a queer, multi-genre writer in her fourth year as a PhD student in creative writing (fiction) at Ohio University. She holds an MFA in fiction from Warren […]
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and polar bears are dyingon my laptop screen.Black ducks floating backwards, a back-bending sun, the see-sawing skyits bed. My iPhone tells me sunflowers face each otherwhen they can’t spot the sun. I’m eating peaches and living by the riverin my head; sparrows are hopping onto branches with last leaves. How much has changed with weather,much has changed and withered. I’m wearing […]
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in dreams a wherea hole should be a bodypregnant with ache, withwords don’t meanyou, what is whoand where to find, fixthe shimmer wind lickedprismatic, amphibious lung-tied but fervent for gills, waterbound but wingedthe […]
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We made Arrested Development-esque chicken imitationsat the restaurant– bakawk, cheep-cheep, wakka wakka– being young, I thought that was the language of love.We always laughed across the chasm of the room when we shut shop, squeezing soap rags into heart buckets,wiping fresh clear streaks on mahogany tables. I vacuumed pita crumbs and invisible dust, emptied bags […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Paris Jessie (they/she) is a black, budding creator and wanderer. Much of their work is rooted in the peculiar. You may find more at iamparisjessie.com.
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In the city that birthed rebellion in the decade before my mother birthed me, I have built a home out of ruins. This city that burned itself and then rose from its own ashes has been my guide, showing me the way through the flame ignited by my own personal book of matches. This city, […]
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Creation story #1: God makes a woman out of honey, dripping-sweet, wet and sticking and oozing grace, his hands warming it as he shapes and then she is there, the sun behind her making her glow, molten. She is sweet, she melts by noon. God leaves her in the garden and upon returning she is […]
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Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators the luxury by Darren C. Demaree “In the luxury, Darren C. Demaree constructs a response to the catastrophic death of the natural world that enacts rage, love, and grief all at once. Filled with endless lyricism and an unpunctuated momentum, Demaree’s poems cascade and overflow. As […]
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Canthius is open for unpublished prose and poetry submissions from writers of marginalized gender identities, including trans, Two Spirit, non-binary, agender, cis women, genderqueer, GNC, and intersex writers. Deadline: March 15th. Chronicle Books is currently accepting applications for one-year paid editorial fellowships in the Art Publishing Group, the Entertainment Publishing Group, and the Children’s Publishing […]
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Check out Emily Stoddard’s list of publishers publishing poetry manuscripts, including publishers with no fees or fees-waived opportunities Applications for PEN America’s Emerging Voices Fellowship are due on January 31st. Applicants must be at least 21, must reside in the U.S. at the time of applying for, and during the duration of, the fellowship, must […]
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for Symil heres’s a secret: where I come from,all the fairytales begin with instead, and my neck has earnedits permanent ache from looking backeven though there is no one left to save. in this life the window shares its own desolation and grief is stored in miniature paper cups.some days I miss my old transformations,the kind that turned braid […]
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Transition, sacrament of selfTo die at twenty-two and start anewThis is my body given for you To return the same, but changed–the hero’s journey Do this in remembrance of me Charlie Divine is a current student at Portland Community College studying American Sign Language/English Interpreting. They live with their 32 houseplants in the shrub-steppe of rural Oregon.
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no seriouslytake ithere’s my passcode there’s likeover 200 finished poems on there nowplus drafts of old textsyou already have plusevery drunk thoughteveryone’s numberevery tinder chatevery bored selfiea few nudesit will take youyears to get through everything there’s also a 250+ page google docof my spark notes for a new economybet your girlfriend’s read some of thoseanywaythere are passwordsperiod appsshopping […]
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Delete the voicemail before the end. Win. Burn the letter. Smear the ash into the sidewalk. Win. No, save the letter for the restraining order. Lose. Decide against filing the police report. Cops are transphobic already. Lose. File it after all. Feel worse. Lose. Order pizza. Panic at the doorbell. Lose. Forget to close the […]
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Kazuo Ishiguro, a Japanese-born Englishman who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, reminds readers that humans and robots both fall under the definition of ‘being’. Klara and the Sun does not just include the loss of being when devoting everything to serving higher-ups, but explores spirituality and mortality, seeking God when God does […]
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Turtle Mountain wasn’t really a mountain. Standing eighteen metres short of the accepted geological classification of 300 metres, it was technically a hill. This was a widely espoused fact in my neighbourhood, square in the landmass’s disappointing shadow. The Turtle Mountain High class of ‘96 famously taped together twenty yardsticks and planted the end into […]
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Little Sister The scene is Dad on a staircase. Yellow air. Sticky-sick sounds formulating. “He’s like an angel.” There was a banal frame, Macy’s-like, with husband, mother, daughter, son-brother. “It’s the white shirt.” There are screams. There is a mother clasping head between arms between legs and cracked-door. Legs and arms and matted hair. There […]
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My mother broke herself into so many pieces that when she glued herself back together there were some shards she would never find. One day, she decided to stop trying to fix herself and focus her attention on shaping someone else. So she adopted a baby from China. She would mold this child into a […]
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When I was four, I told everyone that my mother was a stuffed rabbit, but only because my father told me this himself. He is a toymaker, and the night after my mother died, he gave it to me and said this was her now. This was where she had gone. I accepted this because […]
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Art is something I’ve always been drawn to. It’s a whole world of possibilities and ideas that can influence culture and society. On the other hand it can be something that looks pretty, and looks great hung on a wall. There can be so much and so little that goes into art making, where artists […]
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The Most Beautiful Things Could End Us by Zach Murphy a grocery list by Kelly Stohr Stonescript by Ryan Tan
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In her debut poetry collection, Dear Diaspora, Susan Nguyen engages us in a conversation on grief and ecstasy, and how those two seemingly juxtaposed experiences are intrinsically linked. Winner of Prairie Schooner’s Book Prize in Poetry, Dear Diaspora was published in 2021 by the University of Nebraska Press. Nguyen is exploring grief as it’s related […]
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Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Another Way to Split Water by Alycia Pirmohamed In Alycia Pirmohamed’s debut collection, Another Way to Split Water, a woman’s body expands and contracts across the page, fog uncoils at the fringes of a forest, and water in all its forms cascades into metaphors of longing […]
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i am walking against the cold without much effort. lucky, because my mind is unconcerned with my legs and is working quite hard on optic flow. funny, you never notice a thing like optic flow until it runs with a bit of a lag. suddenly i am still and watching the pavement unfold and the […]
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I’m wearing a lavender gownand holding up the waist ofmy Carhartts with both handslike I’m in a potato sack race — we have to stop meeting like this The same nurse as last timegreets the scrambled output of my EKG reading with a too-long silence: OddI’ve never seen it do this before The gap between thunder and […]
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We are all initial-ly named what our families can say.Glanced and category theorized, my morphismsurvives to asterism, even as dopped cabochon.To rock the dome is a beautiful breakage,if it happens. Cleave define or indefinite-ly or to infinite stroked to part-icle spark—when -ever it turnsout my grain can do all that and unbag. A Brazilian born […]
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Here I am wonderingIf my poetry will make meA goddamn Master of Fine ArtsAnd you with your talking blues. Sometimes entire days pass and one thinks aboutJust money. It’s toxic.Aren’t weekends forDrinking beer and lemonadeAnd getting fucked?Count your blessingsFor they comeEvery few weeks.In betweenDream-crawl orWrite an ars poetica:You know the form so well. Now that […]
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In north central Oklahoma, otherwise gorgeous with luscious hills and curiously red dirt, litter abounds: Styrofoam Chick-fil-A cups, empty cigarette packs, and, beginning in 2020, discarded face masks. I’d started a green neighborhood initiative in the small Oklahoma town that my now-wife and I called home. The goal was not only to pick up trash, […]
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The start of cold nights, strong winds, and early sunsets always make November a hard month to adjust to. With summer days long past, and a new year on the horizon it makes the passage of time feel like a physical phenomena. Or it could just be the cold seeping into my bones. Contemplation of […]
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Laying stillhas ripped opena thin, temporal levity on a morningit is snowingmy own worth revealed to me again & again, againan incandescent nothingness. Aiyana Masla is the author of the chapbook Stone Fruit (Bottlecap Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in Cordella Press, Field Notes, West Trestle Review, in the collection So Many Ways to […]
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i.An angel came to me the otherday, said “Wanna make out in mycar?” I’ve not been so keen onthat sort of thing sincedysphoria set in, the guilty teethof wolverines sliding scalpel-sharpin the space beneath my breasts. Butthis wasn’t a beautiful command, norwas it the word of God:The angel pleads like 50s loungesingers in with the […]
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I’ve always tried to proceed with caution. The few things we owned I made sure not to break. How selfish could a poor brown boy be? Let alone three? Grassless backyards and baseballs there we were. Unminding any manner we learned in a country that molded & scolded us. America’s past time to pass time, […]
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hey,super sorry forthrowing up on your couch last night missed the antique hunter green velvet thanks to the deli bag you haphazardly tossed over never knew i could havesuch good aim i keep doing thisThing – not the puking but thebleeding mascarabuying myself baby’s breatheating crumpledvalentines losing my left shoeneeding you to find itasking my therapistwhyit-is-so-hard-to-be-lovedthree months laterstill i can’t believea […]
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In her new chapbook, Bodies of Separation, Chim Sher Ting examines the connecting threads and thread snips that tie and break identity. In this collection from Cathexis Northwest Press, Ting crafts poems that play with her Singaporean-Chinese heritage, culture, and language. By drawing upon the images and phrases of her youth and how they have […]
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Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Prescribee by Chia-Lun Chang Reading Prescribee is not dissimilar to the experience of coming across a recipe in a vintage American cookbook: it transforms the familiar ingredients of contemporary life into an uncanny, discomfiting concoction. Wielding English as a foreign language and medium, Chang redefines the […]
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CNF:Aftertaste of Coffee by Simra Sadaf (Issue 72)Finding Grace by Sam Frost (Issue 75) Fiction:Daughter of a King by Shaelin Bishop (Issue 69)Sprout by Morgan Dick (Issue 74) Poetry:Tehillim 96 by Miriam Saperstein (Issue 70)Sonnet Against Capitalism by Timothy Otte (Issue 67)
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At precisely ten o’clock on the morning of March 23, the spokesperson of the World Health Organization entered the press room and walked up to the microphone. Assembled in front of him were reporters and bloggers from the international media community. The majority represented mainstream newspapers, television channels, podcasts and websites. A few were fringe […]
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We have a new opening for one volunteer position: Art Editor. See below for application details. Please note: all staff positions are volunteer and are thus unpaid. All positions are also virtual/remote. We encourage applicants who are members of marginalized groups (LGBTQIA, POC, WOC, women, disabled folks, etc.), but all are welcome to apply. Please […]
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Read Part 1 of the interview here. “Anatomy of a Fish Hook” is one of my favorites. There’s this tension between the lovers but it’s also quite a sexy poem. How do you go about starting to write an intimate scene? What sort of language do you find yourself gravitating toward the most when writing […]
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A girl on the plane says, I was stuckwith all these crazy people and I wasnormal. Incredibly, I say, Same same.It was not I who pulled madnessfrom the water. My arms are my own.But everything I’m saying is true:nothing real has changed. Thesewhiskers, these black eyes were there all along—what am I becoming, I say, […]
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VAGABOND CITY 