Art, Everything, Issue 95, Reviews + Interviews

An Interview with Nicole F. Kimball

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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Everything, Issue 95, Reviews + Interviews

In Review: A Long Walk by John Drudge

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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Everything, Fiction, Issue 95

Black Salt, part 2 by Lace Franklin

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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Everything, Issue 94, Opportunities for Artists & Writers, vagabond city

Opportunities for Artists and Writers | April 2024

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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Everything, Issue 94, Poetry, vagabond city

A Lack of Birds by Eric Cline

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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Everything, Issue 94, Now Read This, vagabond city

Now Read This | April 2024

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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Everything, Issue 93, Now Read This

Now Read This | March 2024

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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Art, Everything, interview, Issue 93, Reviews + Interviews

An Interview with JC Alfier

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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Everything, Issue 93, review

In Review: Periodic Boyfriends by Drew Pisarra

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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Everything, Issue 93, Poetry

Immaculate Mary by Livvy Linz Winkelman

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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Creative Nonfiction, Issue 92

Midday Rush by Becs Tetley

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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Fiction, Issue 92

Like Dough by Tara Awate

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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Issue 92, Poetry

Self Portrait as Roadkill by Teddy L. Friedline

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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Issue 92, Poetry

Rationality by Emma Zhang

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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Issue 92, Poetry

August, Beyond by PJ Carmichael

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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Issue 92, Poetry

Spell for the Skin Underneath by Asia Nichols

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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Now Read This

Now Read This: February 2024

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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Issue 92, review, Reviews + Interviews

In Review: Universal Red by Maria Gray

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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Everything, Issue 91, Poetry

In Sickness & In Health by Audrey T. Carroll

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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Everything, Issue 91, Poetry

i spent 3 hours by Maeve Vitello

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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Everything, Issue 91, Now Read This

Now Read This | January 2024

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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Everything, Fiction, Issue 91, Prose

10.5 by Erica Peplin

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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Creative Nonfiction, Everything, Issue 91, Prose

Mirror God by Megan Xing

 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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Issue 90, Now Read This

Now Read This | December 2023

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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Issue 90, Poetry

Fractured Love Song by Calvin Jones

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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Issue 90, Poetry

BEAST by Colette Reed

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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Everything, Issue 89, Poetry

The Green of Your Lungs by Shaw

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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Fiction, Issue 89, Prose

What Shouldn’t I Be? by angel ogoemesim

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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