Articles

after Ocean Vuong I remember your car lighter. I remember your car lighter’s orange tip igniting the cigarette at your lips. I remember your breath thickening the cabin air. Back then you smoked every drive home. I remember the smoke replacing words, explanations, like why you were always the one who picked me up from …

Survival Strategies by Tennison S. Black (University of Georgia Press, 2023) Tennison S. Black’s poetry collection Survival Strategies (University of Georgia Press, 2023), selected by Adrienne Su as the winner of the National Poetry Series, bristles with the sound, texture, and experience of life in the Sonoran. Black digs up roots, tenderly dissecting the speaker’s …

you say fuck me so loud you swallow the sounds from next door my fingers slide into your clit soaking my grandmas body stopped two hours ago & yours arches towards me it is almost ontological my calloused palms melt into your waist & i squeeze my grandmas waist wasting away you breathe my name …

the scout master called my father says and i can tell by the switch in his throat that this is the night he will die we head to church an hour before the troop meeting master waits for us outside watches as we stomp through unkempt oklahoma grasses no one’s bothered to mow down now …

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 …