Articles

Togetherness by Wo Chan (Nightboat Books, 2022) Wo Chan’s debut book, Togetherness, is a tender recognition of self and a snapshot of one Chinese immigrant life in the United States. Threaded throughout this collection are stories of life as a restaurant baby, gender(ed) identity, the fight against deportation, kinship (with its many forms and complications), …

“Rebuilding Self,” 12×16 inches, acrylic on canvas, 2021 Nikita Ares was born and raised in Cagayan de Oro, Philippines, a beautiful city in the Northern region of Mindanao. In 2018, she graduated cum laude from Cornish College of the Arts where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts. She immigrated with her family from the …

This used to be a garden, before the strangers came with strange beliefs. They claimed to be cursed with something they called original sin, but blessed with something else, called dominion over the whole living earth. They tore apart the garden, insisted that the savage wilds be conquered and subdued to be improved. We are …

We barrel through backroads past pink plastic chairs, a puddle of bottle caps, titos squatting flat-footed under the greasy sun. Sweat rags swung around their necks, their tank tops rolled halfway up themselves, stomachs glistening. I cling to my torn leather seat, basketball shorts yanked in the wind, the smell of gas swatting my nose. …

The establishment poet writes poems with subtle rhymes and gentle wit that has no bite and beautiful, reassuring lines about how you are loved and the world is kind— lines you might find printed on coffee mugs or stitched on throw pillows in department stores, lines that might make a cheugy gal sigh, “Well isn’t …

Maze 20 Maze 19 Maze 8 Keith S. Wilson is an Affrilachian Poet and a Cave Canem fellow. He is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award, and has received both a Kenyon Review Fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship. Additionally, he has received fellowships …

Over a hundred years, no doubt, & big enough to need grinding, left instead to gray& grow smooth.

We were traveling in Melbourne Australia back in January of 2018. The location was at the entrance to the Melbourne Museum of Art. The image was made looking through a window that had water running down on the outside.

The man at the window is my father. He has lost most of his sight and suffers from Charles Bonnet syndrome. His vision drifts and spins, the wind blowing light across the yard of his house on Blackhawk Street. All day he sits in his chair looking out, seeing cats and Cadillacs, rabbits with mittens, a child with red hair, weary soldiers standing in a circle smoking. All are born of light, all a blur of energy and memory. Something green is swallowing something white, a boat perhaps on stormy Pine Lake.

The dream goes like this: barefoot in the grass, I follow the white brick wall that separates the gated community from the sprawling golf course behind it. My left-hand grazes the wall as I pass a dozen back patios with the same glass tables, the same expandable umbrellas, deck chairs, potted mums, hoses coiled perfectly into stacked loops. The blinds are closed in each dim window of each sleeping house. One of the houses is where I live with my partner, JM, who is sleeping as everyone else sleeps.