Articles

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 …

—Genesis 29:20 And he watered her flock and kissed her mouth, וַיַּ֕שְׁקְ wayashq and וַיִּשַּׁ֥ק wayishaq, binding care with the carnal, their muzzles warm beneath his tending hands, her mouth bright as the nectar of pomegranates. Desideratum is a word for something wanted or needed, whose root means both “to find a lack of” and …

Every morning of my first year, my mother’s father drove over at dawn to bathe me and walk with me among trees, touching my tiny fingers to things as he named them, saying, bark, saying, web, saying, air and grandfather and granddaughter, all to say, Welcome; I have waited so long for you. At a …

God, we spend our whole / lives persevering / long winter stars scalding / us / as if heaven’s a place / real as the corner diner / alight all night / where I enter easily even as a sinner / hungering for eggs / over easy & devour them. / Let’s cover this early …

Or How to Disguise a Carolinian in New York INGREDIENTS 8 (4 ounce) catfish fillets 1 tsp cayenne (make it hot) 1 quart oil (sweated from a road stand 2 tsp pepper shambled & split) 1 pinch of garlic salt 2 cups buttermilk ½ tsp onion powder 2 cups cornmeal, thick as silt 1 dash …