Poetry

I am not the brain in the mouth, she whispered so quietly she could barely feel her lips utter lullabies to her small daughter drifting into sleep underneath a mound of blankets. I am not to utter, to understand, to wetware an existence. To hold the fingertips carefully. The children carefully rubbed blood from puddles …

She is the pinnacle of wrenching the last crumbed teardrop out of the cereal box upon waking. I want more silky light that is mothering light that drips over my body as I rise out of the bed and make all of this work. Make half a life matter to the rest of the decades …

The girl who sat down for a minute was used to being in a million places all at once, was used to being a million different people she had to be. She once served as the executive director of the turmoil clean up team back home, but that was years ago. I heard one day …

Until now, loss & body is howto articulate grief. The law of articulation states that the story is used to find the unknown. What is the story?A boy is chiseled wrong in the face and his name is what happens when a preacher jumps from faith to faith. His lineage, a long history of people …

Only you would exit that way, your cashmere sweater draped on a chair, a lemon you nicked in your pocket. Only you could say when you don’t spend money on yourself, people notice, and leave me believing it was sage advice. Only you served up the perfect cappuccino – at Marco’s, at Besaw’s, and in …

C. Rees is a queer Pennsylvania-born eco-poet, writer, and New Writers Project alumnus living in Austin, TX. His work excavates the intersections between trauma and emergent landscapes, the contamination and contagion of violence, and lineage and complicity in rural settings. They fuse elements of speculative, horror, fabulist genres to explore the sediment of idealized “idyllic” …

You dream, often, of scalpels. Of carving an absence into your chest—there is weight here that only the body knows. A kind of tenderness made in the dismantlement of a form. You make yourself holy with every change. And, too, every refusal. Rocks have ridges as much as concaves—remain coarse where they are smooth. Dysphoria …

1. Because black 2. Because she 3. Because she black 4. Because she because she black because she wife 5. Because she because she black because she wife because she hoop 6. Because she because she black because she wife because she dunk because she tatted up 7. Because free because free black because wife …

Jennessa Hester is a transgender writer and scholar working out of Lubbock, Texas. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, HAD, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. She serves as a managing editor for the Iron Horse Literary Review and poetry editor for Wrong Publishing. Find her on social at @cherrypoppunk.

My story starts not where the bullet pierces flesh but where the blood pools all around. Some waves of pain never stop, no matter how well one writes of healing. My story starts symbolically as a mirror in front of which I knot my necktie, half-Windsor, the way my late father taught me years ago, …