A drowning person will not splash and wave, will not shout or call out for help. Contrary to the ways in which it is dramatically performed on television and in film, drowning is nearly always physically unexpressed, measurably silent.

I grew up immune to the ordinary, surrounded by a past / I was expected to sit on and memorize

i know you’re thinking of me: it’s just about to rain.

The Devil knew exactly where to go. There were plenty of places in the world where the sun slanted long across plaza stones and shone like diamonds in the spray of fountains.

We were on the roof of Nikita’s house, drinking beers. This is in the Central Valley. The roof was black and, so, hot. It wasn’t summer yet, but almost.

I have known Joshua Burton since 2014 when we attended the Boldface Workshop at the University of Houston.

We leave our offerings. We prepare the meat the way / we were taught, snap the wing, relish the song of crack

As a Californian, Daniel Gumbiner has thought a lot about the aftermath of disaster. What happens long after the emergency workers and news cameras have gone home?

Monica Youn is one of the most brilliant people you will ever meet. This seems to be a shared consensus among the people I know who have also met her.

I was twenty-seven when I saw him again, at a birthday party for my sister that uncomfortably straddled the line between our broke college years and some recently adopted bourgeois values.

Site is a four-part series of visual poems/essays/works. Each work reproduces the Trinity Test site in New Mexico—the location of the first atomic blast the world has known—at specific moments in time after the detonation.

“atmospheric river” they say, as if we are children, / as if air was water, as if all was just one phase change away

When I get to heaven I will be bruised / and I will not answer any of God’s questions.

I grow daffodils now, try to reimagine / night and pretend that doors are / simple.

an exercise in mining the worst possibilities from the ridges / of the brain absent of stalagmitic reach

before their war, the Aqlla served / overflowing quinoa milk / to unworthy undeserving grins

I can still feel / my father’s hands / pulling my hair / into a rough ponytail

Lobsang kept saying that crossing fates with me would get him killed. When we first got on the road, an old woman at the foot of the mountain had been…

I’m writing a book about fires. Metaphorical and literal. About the way human relationships spontaneously combust. How a self crashes and burns.

My father said there were no other / words like the compound words / in the Armenian language.

Reading my grandfather’s notebooks, I’m trying to / know madness as a way of searching.

Jami Nakamura Lin is a Chicago-based writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Electric Literature, and Bat City Review, but you might know…

Fady Joudah’s newest poetry collection […] (Milkweed Editions, March 2024), written during the bombardment of Gaza from October to December 2023, marks the loss of language during an ongoing genocide.

Through the logic and lens of horror films, Reed examines the market demands of poetry (yes, these do exist), academic life, and the anxieties produced by the COVID-19 pandemic and rising fascism.

Farah Ali’s novel, The River, The Town (Dzanc Books, 2023), set in an unnamed municipality in the south of Pakistan, reads like an eerie fictional mirror to an Amnesty International report released the same year.

Mazin, our first, arrives in 92. He comes out at three and a half kilograms, which the doctor tells me is normal.

Lisa Teasley’s first three books, Glow in the Dark, Dive, and Heat Signature came out in 2002, 2004, and 2006 respectively.

Beauty also is unaccounted for. / The mist is merely what it is: water

When my mother left for the man with a cruel son, I kept / my nails sharp for when he would draw back, swing. I left

I met Christine during a balmy summer at the Winter Tangerine workshops in New York.

And yet: my work is labor the way love is labor, is liability, is constant risk assessment.

I am writing myself / into the mother of this poem

It takes one hand to imitate : the unabashed kidsfucking in their car : a bird on piano : near a spur linein the woods : but you hear a flock : j told…

It happened in a matter of seconds, this overlay of violence in my mind, that took us into another life, and then it was gone. Perhaps what I wanted was to have my future thrust upon me. No, I thought, just another anxious fantasy. It was just the mind’s preparation on overdrive. It all might have happened differently. The alligator had every intention of biting her. Tori’s face flashed with anger momentarily before Frank tried to pull her away.