My sister’s the one who ran away on a headless horse. She escaped with her bruises to a land that didn’t know her, built a room with sixteen walls and […]

It’s not even noon, but the sun’s way high, and Johnny’s on the jukebox. I’m sitting in the world’s shiniest diner, staring at the woman who has the most beautiful […]

This is not a lie: My interview for a job as an inmate tutor in the GED program at a federal prison was two questions long. Question One. Can you […]

some thanks some memories preserve shared edges; us bearing our asymmetry, you dogearing seams against my thigh… an infinite double- bind persists: two things might not be equal but i […]

This place is haunted. Or it could be, with its bravado of wind and rolling whitecaps and the rhythm imbued by waves slapping the rock wall. All an implication of […]

[Moved Somewhere] Moved somewhere. Stayed up to midnight. Flew elsewhere. Came back. Got […]

My mother wants to sell me oils. The oils smell like fresh-cut flowers and citrus fruits and the fishbowl stench of a house that’s been left unoccupied for several months. […]

I had a job over the summer, not because of financial necessity but because my mother held an unshakable belief in the virtue of work. She said that I needed […]

Don’t look at me I am new and born today Dreaming has changed me The night has Melted off all my influences I saw the big sky turn over twice […]

In Madame Bovary, Emma’s desire comes from the novels she reads. These novels are so full of fantasy that they lead her to a life that bucks the status quo […]

The King Must Die I do not trust the strength of our gods in the most fertile land I have seen people shredding each other apart our body bursts out […]

Hurricane seasons are like children, so you micromanage your first with a dizzying array of safeguarding steps. As you nail plywood to your windows, fill every container you have with […]

The diagrams below are excerpted from Emmalea Russo’s new book of poetry, Confetti (Hyperidean Press, 2022). Confetti begins and ends with ecstatic sunrises/sunsets in the 1970s, opening with The Texas […]

be my talismanic property be my new prize for wanting the narcissism of this hot world cut loose like a blimp I came to revirginize my willpower, a white light […]

It is within reach, what I need most; creative time alone. That is, no co-educational tits occupying the airspace above my shoulder as I labor to paint them, pink as […]

There was a horse I met, his name was the thought of a tree. I saw him in the backdrop of darkness in my mind, and on a farm, and […]

Here is a world, black and body, a mother who is protected and timeless, a father who is her husband and stays. a midwife with hands worth more than a […]

At twenty-three, I already know that I am going to outlive every man I fuck. I am going to outlive my mother and my father. I am going to outlive my sisters. Both of them. The older and the younger one. I am going to outlive the gray squirrel on the pine tree outside my apartment window as well as the mailman who delivers my Amazon package of Certain Dri fragrance-free solid deodorant. So far, I have already outlived each of my childhood pets. I have outlived one set of my grandparents. I have outlived friends. I have attended one candlelight vigil in the foothills and another in the neighborhood park. I have definitely outlived my virginity.

One day the piano in the hallway of our apartment in Berlin began to tease me. I wanted to touch it but I didn’t know how. I had stayed away from black and white keys until this point, the phase in life when you start to regret the chances you have missed more than the mistakes you have made. The next day I asked Konrad, my son’s piano teacher, if he would teach me, too. He shrugged and I took it as a yes.