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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Thanksgiving is not the place to get naked and unashamed. That was Eden, and we are several miles away. Thanksgiving is the place to deliver chrysanthemums coaxed into the shape of poultry. As you hand your aunt the flower turkey, distance crimps carefully. It is as guarded and dry as her smile in its separate […]
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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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I arrive first. The server seats me by the window but I know you like to be tucked into the fold of the café, so I ask for a high table in the back. I glimpse your tan skin at the door. Your green eyes find mine. We smile. You pull me into a hug […]
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9 February, 2017 I’m trying to be normal but it’s hard. I’m scared of all the psychiatrists. I write this and stop, my pen hovering over my journal. I don’t know what I’m feeling and I don’t want to excavate, like I had been. I leaf through the previous pages, more than thirty of them […]
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Teddy L. Friedline (he/they) is a transmasc queer writer in Pittsburgh. He was the recipient of the 2022 Sophie Kerr Prize. Their work has appeared in Hood of Bone Review, Fauxmoir, DEAR Poetry Journal, the lickety~split, and elsewhere. He is an MFA candidate at Chatham University. You can find them on Instagram and on Twitter, […]
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after Jenny Qi the point at which we swallow ourselves again & againuntil negated, oceans of spacetime measured (in meters)by a single blue vase. if rational: a gap. if linear: a reachingwe part to fill. crave nothing as preferred to emptiness.undefined, inescapable, if not an end, i want an awakening.shake the point from which i […]
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Highway hypnosis. Dozing off in the centerlane. A chicken crossing the road. Fulltank of gas. The incomprehensible divinityof this moment. Route 2 and the roadwestward. Natural beauty of NewEngland landscapes. Laundry hangingon a clothesline, drying out in the Summersun. Permanent vacation. A state of mind.The Commonwealth of Massachusetts. (Forbetter or for worse.) A weekend cookoutwith […]
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open wounds, let me in, i am the words that wraparound your incisions, closingthem up so insects and other pestsdon’t fuck with you in this raw phase.i am the words that suck outall the pus, infecting you from pasttraumas and misunderstoodmamas wanting to school youon the realities, the uteralitiesof life, forgetting—you gotta live it and […]
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Remington Review is accepting submissions of up to five pieces of art, CNF of up to 3000 words, fiction of up to 3000 words, and up to five poems for its next issue until March 8th. Send submissions as Word Docs and brief third-person bio via email with your name and submission’s genre in the […]
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Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Alt-Nature by Saretta Morgan Alt-Nature moves in the desert dreams and riverbeds, an emergent chorus feeling toward languages of connection of the American Southwest. These poems open to the desert as a practice of sensuality. Landscapes and Black queer social ecologies illuminate an anti-map of interior […]
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Sharp and utterly human, Maria Gray’s debut chapbook “Universal Red” (Ghost City Press, 2023) is a blade to the heart that seeks to turn a personal story of grief into a history of survival. As a survivor and victim of sexual assault, I shed tears reading these visually enticing poems. Beginning with a poem that […]
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Michael Moreth is a recovering Chicagoan living in the rural, micropolitan City of Sterling, the Paris of Northwest Illinois.
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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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Priyam Bhattacharya is from New Delhi, India. She works and learns in the field of psychology. She attempts to murmer and voice dreams, nightmares and observations through her paintings
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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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Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators One Impossible Step by Orides Fontela (translated by Chris Daniels) In her lifetime, Orides Fontela resisted all labels, all attempts to situate her work in a particular movement, school, tendency, or tradition. Here, in her first ever English-language collection, Fontela’s poetry continues to defy easy categorization. […]
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Anthropocene is currently accepting free poetry submissions during the month of December. Send 1-3 unpublished poems and a bio of no more than 50 words as one document to anthropocenepoetry@gmail.com. Deadline: 12/31. Feminist Press is accepting full-length book manuscripts. Submit a synopsis of your work, a brief explanation of why it is a good fit […]
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It’s cold without you and I’d rather you left me rawcurl against you I’ll try not to scream watching you smile as you rip away my skinI think it’s nice it’s really hell I start to dread being aloneevery second without you A BLESSING I say I want you gone from my lifeAfter you kiss me I am a hollowed-out shellI smile through […]
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Jessica Hsu is an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, where her poems have won Hopwood awards. Their writing has been published or is forthcoming in VIBE, Passengers Journal, HAD, and others.
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i wore my early days warm as bearskin, spinning out and into the sea. i told her that i wouldnever fall in love and she said just you wait, sweetheart, and guess what? i entered every room through the crack below the door, i licked clean plates to markthem mine, soft as i could, hated […]
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I thought a lot about trees while reading john compton’s latest chapbook. Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” was running through my head, but in the style of the soundtrack for Hereditary. Visions of arboreal shadows and sapling harbingers and brittle bark crumbling between blood filled my mind and ran like roots against my jaw. i use […]
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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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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: violence, self-harm Honey said holding onto memory is like trying to grasp water with spread fingers. She told me to hold on to the sweet ones, to turn my mind into cupped palms before they leak from the gaps of my fingers. If you remember anything, remember this: hold on, hold on, she’d […]
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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 