Selected for publication by Lena Valencia Hold Hands, Children It is Tuesday, and Georgie thinks, Tuesday is everything. Everything always happens on Tuesdays. Georgie walks after Luca. He has positioned himself behind Luca to watch the breeze lift the tuft of hair on the back of his head. The wind tickles it like the tail […]
Selected for publication by Kristen Millares Young Promiscuous Young Men[1] I am writing this anonymously,[2] with phrases and sentences that[3] I have borrowed from the library,[4] so nobody knows who did it.[5] If you recognize me[6]—no, you don’t.[7] Like many men, I have a ridiculous weakness for[8] cock and can easily kill[9] two or three […]
Selected for publication by Sara Borjas Facing It after Yusef Komunyakaa in response to “La Malinche,” a portrait painted by Alfredo Ramos Martínez of the Aztec girl whose language skills led her to serve Hernán Cortés as interpreter, guide, and later, mistress— I can almost say my name. Am almostsomeone I know. They say I was sold by […]
I warned you that my grandmother wouldn’t like you and that you wouldn’t like her. The first time she saw me wearing a flannel jacket with my hair chopped off, she said oh boy here we go. That’s who we’re dealing with. The man she’s been seeing—he goes by “Hickory Frank”—is soft in ways she […]
If the Sun Exploded, We Wouldn’t Know it for Eight Minutes The summer we found the body, Mark and I got sunburned every day at the green pool at the back of the apartment complex and flipped his skateboard off the curb in the parking lot. We never smelled the salty air from the beach […]
Janiculum Hill, Rome All November, noon didn’t seem like noon:the light too yellow-gold and pressing long shadowson the burnished stones of every square. Even morningfelt late in the day, as if I’d already missed too much.And of course I had—around the city, marble columnshave cracked into boulders as ordinary as umbrella pines.Roads veer the way […]
🙂 When my order of slime comes in the mailI feed each textured batch its own dribble of borax and spring water. The parcel might as well be a newborn left at the door.We play Loving Family and Caregiver. We play Spa Day. I pull their puddy muscles and twist their pliant bodies at anglesthat feel good […]
Letters to the Museum Docent from One Hundred Years After I – Spring I moved in after the moss,found a place among the relics;made my bed in the vellum-soft interiorof some ancient canoe.I wandered, not so different from the visitors, from the rivers, the ones that paidto traipse about the shimmering halls of history,to study […]
Peach Pit The air conditioning kicks off sometime in the night, and Jonah’s gone from bed when I wake, my skin damp, aflame, like someone’s left the stove on all night and day. It’s the middle of June and the air conditioning is still out. Jonah will get to it when he gets to it. […]
The Other End of the Line My father told me, and so did my roommates later, that when he called my dorm-room landline on September 11th, 2001, he was already panicking. I was eighteen, having moved across the country from our rural island to Manhattan, an island of roughly the same size and shape, the […]
