Emmanuelle Christie – Adulterous Women
Adulterous Women we stopped being before we became, our love suspended against the city walls. one strong rain will dissolve us. we have had our softness sucked hard by monstrosity in our own likeness. we wear our horror like animal skin. in another age, we would feast on locust and honeycomb, her fingers sweetmeats between […]
Mara Lee Grayson – Call It Coping, Call It What You Will
Call It Coping, Call It What You Will In May I stuffed an hourglass with cotton gauze. June was unremarkable but for its aching. By July, I’d grown scars like cigarette paper, and August made me think of baptism, a ritual I’ve never known. It surprised me to see accordions still smoking on my forearm. […]
Zachariah Claypole White – A Catalogue of Moments as Told to My Bedroom Window
A Catalogue of Moments as Told to My Bedroom Window I. Today, my father is a hummingbird against the screen, and we are candles crossing the distance. He is twenty-one: a prophecy of laughter counting pigeon feathers, and I—the sand, waiting his touch. Today, the surgery. Fingers swell ripe as harvest moons. His wedding ring […]
Rose Maria Woodson – Myth
Myth When ancestral you pinned my great, great, great black grandmother to the ground, stormed her vagina, you laughed. Drank her tears like sherry. Got some strange. Picked a part of her from a part of her. Her dreams turned umber. Condensed to heavy clouds. Darkness tentacled her darkness. She spoke rain for the rest […]
DeAnna Stephens – Matrilineal
Matrilineal The candor of these mountains will fracture your footing. Flux of memory sways in the excavator’s cradle— spring grass and bluets choking beneath the rich earth. My darling, your baby teeth will outlast you. Your mother’s grandmother pondered smothering the fires she lit in her summer kitchen’s cranky black heart, yet she fed that […]
