Even My Kinks are Unreliable Locs tossed,gagging ona red bandanatetheringpart-strippedpartly gaspingpartly resignedmy body has learnthow to ride the wavesand still arriveright at the borderof even more need. I go on the internet.Safia still writes of Khartoum& her loved onesZukiswa and other comrades,alongside their flotillashave been abductedright on the shores of Gaza.Pants down,Nigeria, my country dancesaround […]
Rage Let’s get into it.Dad t-bones a Ford in front of your entire fifth grade classroom.The sound is less like impact and more like something splitting down the middle: an orange, a thought, a damp sweatshirt with the wrong cartoon.There’s an ancient Korean proverb I half-remember:A man is a fist with no future.(Every translation leaves […]
Anna May Wong As Optical Illusions Fig 1. When I arrived within the wintered studio,I arrived at the centre of the vacillating concrete junglethat has shaken off its bare-brambled branchesof old lineages. I arrived at a scintillating heliosphere, white heat andsunspots, where the light fell throughthe darkest shadowswith greatest intensity. Fig 2. I was told, […]
First Reconciliation Abecedarian Against my irreverent impulses, I enumerate my sins:blasphemous dinner requests, stressing my parents, switchingC to D on a science test after squinting at my smarter neighbor’s sheet.Decanting my guilt in the booth, I want Father K to know I’ve learned eleven Latin phrases and tried hard to be good. Yes, when a […]
The Strangeness of Survival Today, I am thinking of deathand everything about it. Yet, I do notwant the butterfly nibbling at the flowerverse in my room stamped to death bythe unsureness of persistence welling upin my head. My window is open and thethings outside of it and in their fullnesssay to me, son, come outside, […]
Fork-tender, a hyphenate, is the phrase for the delicacy I wanted to achieve for the stringy turkey before putting it on a plate. This was meat my husband shot, this was early, before I could claim him with that name. This is one of the first offerings he ever brought me. Tower kill refers to […]
Locker Room Prayer I. head bowed,rows of lockersto my righti want noi need to bein prayerclenchedfingers lacedGod on my mindplease, i need tochangebefore it’s too late i shuffle pastthe boys changingflashes of fleshi don’t want to see.the good Catholic boynot thinking ofstubbled jawlines,dark hair. asking, if you can moveum, i need toget to my locker […]
Bad Immigrant You came so farand Iwant onlyto go back. A. J. Bermudez is the author of Stories No One Hopes Are About Them, winner of the 2022 Iowa Short Fiction Award and a 2023 Lambda Award Finalist. Her work appears in The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. She’s a […]
We are pleased to announce the results of the Ninth Letter Regeneration Award for 2025. The Regeneration Award is a multi-genre contest presented in partnership with I-Regen and the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to amplify work thematically connected to the idea of “regeneration,” especially revolving […]
We are pleased to announce the results of the Ninth Letter Literary Awards for 2025. The winners in each genre will be published in our Fall/Winter 2025-26 print issue and on our website. Honorable mentions will be published on our website. Online publication will be concurrent with the release of the print issue. Poetry Winner: […]
