Articles

Everyone said that she should be grateful he’d married her, and the landowner knew it to be true. After all, not only had her family been poverty-ridden for generations, they also had a reputation for being addle-brained. If it had been up to him, wealthy zamindar that he was, he’d never have deigned to even …

question:how else to erupthow else to churn through daily sickness how else to carry what is not minehow else to lean in closer to feel the molting heat how else to get burnedhow else to watch the grass grow back how else to plod like fire ox how else to chew cudhow else to eat …

The world ends on a Wednesday. You’re nearly through your status report. One more sentence explaining the Gantt chart you spent two hours massaging into place, and then your mid-week review would’ve been done. That chart was like a seed you’d nestled tenderly in the earth, positioned just so beneath a beam of sunlight, and …

Dear Reader, Sometimes I come dangerously close to believing some kind of Evil—the mandate of “take take take”—has taken over this world once and for all. At such times, I start to wonder where I might find a nice cave to call my own, or perhaps a soft patch of sand suitable for head-burying. But …

the golden oak kitchen cabinet crashed to the floor this morning just as I was simmering a dream of caribou and wolves nearly clipped the corner off the sleepfog swirling like eggs in a teflon frypan a mug of tea splattered when it slipped my grip shocked by the shriek of the cabinet’s unhinging now …

give me a spoon,shallow bowl oftarnished silver,ornate handleleft over fromyour grandmother’syouth. a grapefruitspoon, its tinyserrated edgemade to cut throughtender skin andunholy flesh.give me a spoonand I will diga tunnel tochina, startingwith my body,carving deeperand deeper andinto my gut,under my ribs,serving up myentrails, one smallscoop at a time. Brittany Davis (She/They) is a lesbian, transfemme poet …

your mark on blue-black canvasundertones of summer sunsets &pink peonies & pinã.risk the strokewithout guide or conjurer;this is yours.etch the lines of locs inside outto coiled veins & arteries.let shadowbright crevice your face.allow what arises first to be enough. stare boldly in its eyes syncopated cackle at your reflection.rinse each brushed experiencefully anew –there is …

Some things you can’t prepare for—the widow knows where the important papersare, but her fingers won’t work the lock.And when my mother died, and I stood up,I found for a moment that I couldn’t walk.So it was when I sat beside youin the room for the gravely ill,and though I saw you wanted a sip …

Rae Gouriand’s long poem The Velvet Book (Cornerstone Press, 2024) is a deeply visceral and textured exploration of grief, queer commitment, and desire. Gouriand’s work rejects stasis – both in terms of voice and form – through the speaker’s meditations on artistry, marriage, and the self, woven through the poem as velvet. The Velvet Book …

Nothing will come of nothing,which holds true too for the meagerlapels we fashioned from piedand unblinking marigolds, holdstrue even for the snapdragonsyet unready for picking, the goldenraspberries, the wooden basinof straw somebody’d named Music.I looked at you; I thought good thoughts;we debated whether that raptorworlds away with its wingsoutspread was a hawk or a vulture.I …