Hybrid

Epistolary Experiment Conducted August 2018 GB: In the summer of 2018, I invited Jennifer S. Cheng to engage in a hybrid, epistolary experiment: During the span of two weeks—while I was in Vermont for a conference and she was at her home in the Bay Area—we would create something every day, with each other as …

A full-throated rustling at each long window. Landline with static. My partner tells me that our connection makes me sound faint or fuzzy and often doesn’t answer the phone when I try. I could be engulfed by the forest, slowly overtaken by unnamed insects I hear but not see, who I don’t know the names …

Emdash 高璐璐 is a neurodivergent poet, writer, educator, host and daughter of Chinese immigrants. Her poems are published in sine theta, poetry.onl, Kissing Dynamite, The Good Life Review and Queer Rain. Her prose lives in Mochi Magazine, Mashable, The Rumpus, Split Magazine and YLWRNGR. She has performed at The San Diego Art Institute, Historic Filipinotown LA …

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, …

(CW: sexual harassment) putting away parcels of sugary cereal, Mountain Dew, cold cuts of turkey and ham from the deli wrapped in cellophane, all of this from cart to trunk, slamming metal closed tight, getting in their cars or out of them and into the sterile lights of the store, while somewhere a little girl …

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 …

Cook even when the dishes are piling. Cook; the food will be ready before UberEats gets there. Cook because of taxes. Cook to keep family recipes. Cook to have leftovers, so you don’t cook tomorrow. Cook so there’s no MSG. Cook for vegetables. Cook for your son. Cook for yourself, so you can stop feeling guilty for spending money, for gaining weight, for ordering dessert with every meal. Cook jerk chicken with rub; garlic cloves, scotch bonnets, allspice berries, dried thyme, grated nutmeg, soy sauce, vegetable oil. Cook jerk chicken because it’s your son’s favorite dish. Cook jerk chicken; it goes with white rice, rice and peas, broiled potatoes, blanched broccolis, oven-baked zucchini fries, mac and cheese. Cook jerk chicken because a whole chicken will last three days before you have to cook again.

If you’re like me, you sewed and twisted your own bows onto that winter’s blue spruce, heated oil on the stovetop for popcorn and before it cooled began with thread to bind the pieces together into a single strand of yellow-white light. If there is a shade you can hear, that you are continually drawn to as you remember, it is this color yellow: the yellow that a test subject in an experiment on synesthesia once described as visually embodying both minor and augmented chords, their currents of foreboding and astonishment.

by drea brown   1. on the eve of this new year, in the middle of a pandemic that brings daily surprise and death, i am safe. the only human in my house that needs to be fed, though the stout black cat nibbling my heels would say otherwise. tomorrow there will be plenty of …