Articles

The process had seemed slow at first. This was before it was a process, before the couple had decided this was something to document, to worry over. One morning, Jon’s husband simply woke up shorter. They stood together at the bathroom sink, staring into the mirror at each other, as they had done for many …

Winner of the 2022 “Tobias Wolff Award” in Fiction Years later, the village headman would sigh, “A place without a smile is a pajama without a drawstring – the minute you stand up and walk away, it collapses around your ankles.” Our drawstring stretches many miles from the bustling city of Calcutta to the tiny, …

A full-throated rustling at each long window. Landline with static. My partner tells me that our connection makes me sound faint or fuzzy and often doesn’t answer the phone when I try. I could be engulfed by the forest, slowly overtaken by unnamed insects I hear but not see, who I don’t know the names …

Emdash 高璐璐 is a neurodivergent poet, writer, educator, host and daughter of Chinese immigrants. Her poems are published in sine theta, poetry.onl, Kissing Dynamite, The Good Life Review and Queer Rain. Her prose lives in Mochi Magazine, Mashable, The Rumpus, Split Magazine and YLWRNGR. She has performed at The San Diego Art Institute, Historic Filipinotown LA …

7–Orchid air roots can reach throughout a room, like fingers twining other hands for sun. 16–Why don’t we keep glass Christmas balls in bowls in summer, to refine the heat. 37–Cliffs know how to build desert burrows like hollow gourds. 2—Once people stored drinking gloves in a drawer in their cars. 31—Clothing was two things, …

Taneum Bambrick’s Intimacies, Received is a stunning second collection. Bambrick explores sexual and gender-based violence, illness, and queer sexuality through the speaker’s experiences as a survivor of sexual assault. With images of meat carving, quiet moments of physical closeness, and forms like ekphrasis and a lyric essay, Bambrick illustrates how violence haunts each intimate encounter. …

Winner of the 2022 “Annie Dillard Award” in Nonfiction In 1995, Byron Kim, a Brooklyn based contemporary artist, attempted to paint his childhood home when he realized he could not recall its exact color. He knew it was pink, but he couldn’t remember if the house was the color of a tongue or the pale …

At the apex of night, limbs splayed across the too-small bed, I allow my hands to wander towards the heat of my cunt, desire sharp and pulsing. Beneath the shawl of darkness, I shape my flesh like a block of clay, all its excess overflowing onto the sheets. The smooth flat landscape of my chest …

I was a youth. That could mean anything. A yearling, lion-colored, rippled hills, or black bristling my lip. When you took the knife, I became very still. Thought and wonder peeled away like burnt bark, raw underneath. A pair of eyes just seeing, and breath, and a pulse– Inside my death the possible permanence of …

I visited the arboretum in Arcadia for a date. A peacock honks as if it knows I should’ve stayed home. The day before I got my shin tattooed with a vase. I always end up with flowers on new work because as a kid my mother would take me to pick up potted, red chrysanthemum …