My hair leads me throughmy own house like a ghostlooking for proof of itself,finds only the inconvenientsoft smells of the living,bitter as pith. In themorning I read booksby young men who are oldtoday, or dead, their everyerror cast now into legacy.They seemed to know soearly the worth of the windthat rippled across their longand lingered-over […]
I’m here to pick up a pre‑scription already writteninto my future from historyyou could say I did this tomyself but I was fed and I wasfed and not just food or barelyfood you have to pay whatthings cost and one organ leadsto another a failure to graspthe path from action to con-sequence is written into […]
It was the year my boyfriend and I were playing a lot of sick. Play, mental health experts say, is important. A basic psychological need, in fact. We traded off: every month one of us fell terribly ill, tasking the other with the role of nurse. We’d both grown up before Project GetWell, meaning that […]
His throat opens like the crackle of a flame,his thick mustache, a ribbon carrying the melody as his mouth moves up and down. Above the dinof ATVs, tractors, and chivos, his voice wavers through air like a swallow wheeling deeperinto that abyss. Somewhere constrained in those tremulous notes, he finds his brother, the dead one,asleep […]
Exposure and Response from Vol. 20 No. 02 One toothbrush was orange, the other green. Neither color instructed him on which would be the appropriate choice for a white, straight, twenty-nine-year-old man. If the toothbrushes had been pink and blue, Peter would have chosen the pink one to avoid gender essentialism. He had already touched […]
As if coaching words to swim across oceans for her mother, my mother shouts into the phone to help her family hear or understand. For years, she’s been adding dollars to add minutes to buy time she gets to speak to family who have forgotten all of the details: how much sugar she takes in her chai, if she spells her name with a ‘t’ or a ‘th’. I […]
Hannah Smith is a writer from Dallas, Texas. She received an MFA in Poetry from the Ohio State University, where she served as Managing Editor of The Journal. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, Image, and elsewhere. She is a 2023 National Poetry Series Finalist, and her […]
selected for publication by Robin Marie MacArthur She met him at Waffle House to tell him how much she hated him. He agreed to feeling the same. She spit in his scrambled eggs. He knocked over her mug of lukewarm coffee, and it dribbled into her purse. When she wasn’t looking, he pocketed the tip […]
selected for publication by Chet’la Sebree Servants of God after La Última Cena, Marcos Zapata, c. 1753 In the Last Supper painting that hangs at Cusco Cathedral eleven apostles and Christ flank the centerpiece a roasted guinea pig A bath of light overflows behind Christ’s head In-between two candelabra a window encases the first-quarter moon amongst […]
selected for publication by Janisse Ray In the winter of 1945, Olinka Verdian leaves the Shahumyan province by foot to trek the three miles to the next outpost where they say the telegram has arrived with the names of the dead. She treks through Verin Shen village, over the river, now frozen, through the woods […]
