Articles

Winner of the 2023 Annie Dillard Award for Nonfiction I fell fast, to my knees, both hands buried deep in the mud of a newly turned field saturated by the Seattle January rain. I bent to the earth, too tired to move under the weight of my upended twenty-five-year-old world. My mother, now sleeping in …

& God said, “love your enemy,” & I obeyed him & loved myself. Kahlil Gibran because this mess i made i made with both hands. because the loneliness of astronauts was too much to bear, i guzzled entire bodies, mouths like wounds i’d drain & ditch down a storm pipe. because when you know you’ll …

With her award-winning memoir Red Paint (Counterpoint, 2022), Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe has emerged as a writer who can convey deeply personal material while delighting readers with her mastery of language and formal experimentation. With her poetic debut Rose Quartz (Milkweed, 2023), LaPointe shows similar prowess as a poet who can dance along the line between …

First of all, I didn’t know she was a witch. She didn’t look witchy at all. How many of us look like what we are? Besides, I had student loans to pay off. And here was this nice old lady, in the woods, where I often went to hug trees. I’d seen her ad in …

Sister is a pine tree. She is growing into a big, big thing. I am sad she has no bones. I am sad her blood is sap. But sister will live to be five hundred years old. And I can use her bark to clean my teeth, pin her needles into my braids, and sleep …

pocks on the motherworts. gray-green, white- green, dogeared. no one volunteers to be ill, you say. and i the heart alone sustains us. above the light in cowlicks slips between our sundown’s favored trees. coming around inspiration point’s eastern face, one last mile, we traipse the odd gap-toothed bridges designed to break the ankles of …

If you comb your hair at night, you will lose your memory. i don’t remember which came first, the alzheimer’s or the alopecia. my grandpa lying on our couch– moonlight pooling between clumps of curls like rain falling through a tattered canopy– his sentences cobbled together like the bones of an animal they say once …

“Recognition is the misrecognition you can bear.” – Lauren Berlant “It ain’t only the bad ones nor yet the dumb ones that gets sucked under.” – James Baldwin There wasn’t a funeral. His sun-stricken eyes never felt cool relief under red dirt or earth embrace. His bones have surely bleached under the gaping Connecticut sky. …

Why do you pretend to be stone, wind, bird? – A. AJMÁTOVA ONE STANDS STILL while another takes flight, each according to their nature, I understand stones and birds. Even the elusive owl. If I grew a stem, roots, leaves if I sunk in the water, without breathing but without dying if I were born …

Form, fragments, and new motherhood in Jazmina Barrera’s Linea Nigra These days pour out like water through a sieve and This is how many of my sentences end these days: interrupted, still searching for the closure of punctuation. My journal and the Notes app on my phone are littered with fragments like this. Some days …