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Winner of the 2023 49th Parallel Award for Poetry I want to fit something here about how my father used to console me—told me I was a poor thinker because, when I was a baby, I got so smart so fast God placed a worm in my ear to eat my wisdom. Balance me out. …

I’m sitting at the dining-room table, kicking my bare feet. A fairy-tale feast I’m not allowed to touch is spread on the table in front of me. There are pyramids of pastel macarons. They’re made of plaster, but the Followers don’t know. There are peonies in a glass jar and tiered pink plates of doll-sized …

then you did the unthinkable. ran from the burning pyre, shed off your old self like a snake. vowed to want to live again, and never flirt with hell. wiggled yourself into spaces small enough to swallow you. your back then folded, bowed, but still a bone. executed mental somersaults, threw yourself like bird after …

In my field journal about rocks for my seventh grade biology teacher, I write: You know Georgia peaches. Plump and juicy. And some more hairy than others. Well, today, I went peach picking with my family. We got some really nice ones. I slice open one to find a dancing worm. My body jerked, but …

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 …