On (Still Not) Coming Out I try to anticipate the woundfor the second time. I ask the nurse ifI launch across handlebars, flay a tooth,will spring stems break from cement?he says every stoplight’sblood-thick tongue bites before itforgives. dogs pant in front yardsfacing the sky so I’ll heal without marks:I can pick the thread color for […]
A Quiet Passing [I] at night he tells me about the people he’s killed, about the boyby the river, the woman in her mud & thatch hut, the manhiding in the sharkskin grasslands after dinner we kiss & cuddle, we no longer make love,it is too much, too much to hold & to cradlewithin my […]
No Backsies the extra-large mini-fridge starts up a shimmywhile I’m mid-sentence with my father on the phoneI roll my shoulders against my freshman year cinder block dorm wallsand the ceiling splits—in pokes the head of the Dolphin That Cannot Lie my roommate’s Grapenuts box leaps from the shaking fridgeand out spill my preschool paintings, plastic […]
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 […]
