A Photonovella of American Politics

By Clement Yue

Nobody loves this bird. Very few even really know what it looks like. It perches hidden in thick arboreal foliage⎯black plumage indistinguishable from the canopic shadows. I used to think it was yellow, until someone pointed out to my embarrassment that I was looking at orioles all my life.

By Rachael Greene

Everything you think you might do in a threatening situation melts away. This is it, I thought. Though my mind could not quite accept what it was. My hands raised of their own volition, pointlessly, to shield my more vulnerable parts, and my mouth uttered, like an invocation, the name of the only person who could hear me.

By Mandira Pattnaik

Let’s accept that your infobahn alias is a pariah, and let’s assume that you’ve begun to acknowledge three things: That ghosts haunt your computer, your internet, and everything that exists in a parallel non-physical plane. That ghosts are malleable, can take any form, just like social media profiles and bios. That ghosts aren’t bothered by your rules and/or miscellaneous conventions and laws of the land.

By Jane Marchant

The taxi’s side mirror reflects the driver’s lit cigarette as he maneuvers through the night’s warm exhaust, dust, and sand. Yellow streetlights illuminate the concrete buildings and air conditioners flashing by. After checking into my hostel, I climb into a rickety bunk bed graffitied by past travelers. I am nervous. I am the only guest in the five-story building down a back alley off an alley somewhere in the haze of a city whose language I can neither read nor speak.

By Alex Wexelman

Rivera wrote on her official website, “Growing up, I was steeped in the oral tradition,” the inflection evident in her confident prosody. 

By Alex Wexelman

In 1982, Eavan Boland wrote an essay titled “On Religion and Poetry” for The Furrow, a monthly journal for the contemporary Church. Eleven years later, The Columbia Journal reprinted the tract in its No. 18/19 issue.

By Noah Grey Rosenzweig

My boyfriend gets out of the back seat, pulling his phone out of his back pocket as he straightens up, tapping “record” with a slim finger. His voice is steady when he asks me, the phone held between us, “What are we doing today?” I look up at the camera and tilt my head, squinting against the sun and the fear.

“Getting top surgery,” I say.

“Talk the fire out” is what they called it. In that small place of green crops and clapboard churches, it was a power kept among washed-in-The-Blood types. A kind of faith-healing passed down from one family member to another. I heard tell of a man who melted his hand with fireworks; it healed in a few days with no scar. A woman who spilled hot grease on her leg but the blisters faded without a lick of pain. I’d never seen it done, but we all knew about this power.

Poetry and terror are so interwoven, it is impossible to extricate one without disturbing the other. They run into each other, borderless and pervasive, like music, or scent.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs actualizes how marine mammals survive and how they die in a capitalistic society as one in the same with Black survival and death. This might sound conspiratorial—because it is. Yet this book truly is a scientific guide on marine mammals.

Marisa (Mac) Crane is the author of the debut novel I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, in which a queer, first-time parent must navigate child-rearing while grieving the loss of her partner to childbirth.

Kristopher Jansma’s work isn’t just about the lives of writers; we all tell stories, published or unpublished. We don’t all have to be idealists, but we can all have ideals.

Have you ever watched someone eat an orange and not had the urge to ask, Could I have a piece, please? If you have, then I’m afraid you might be stronger than most / The orange is dined on delicately / She requires care, from start to finish / Even the tearing of her sheath must be done with care or else you sacrifice parts of her fleshy sweetness—first to the rind, then to the compost […]

Jess Richards’ memoir Birds and Ghosts is peppered with pencil sketches of birds—peppered because the specks of bird appear like grains of pepper, coalescing into network structures. Poetry, lyric essay, memoir, prose poetry, occult reflections, and sketches join to form a map, a network, shaped like a brain by connections and synaptic firings.

Superman has nothing on my older brother when he’s high on crack. Muscles tensed, jaw clenched, underwear drenched in piss, standing in the hallway of my mother’s walk-up, years before her death and still more before Tommy winds up beaten down in a half-way house for Mentally Ill Chemically Addicted (MICA) patients […]

I cried while sitting on the toilet the other day. It’s not what you think, I promise. The culprit was not a sour taste of spoiled food or night of drinking […]

What does it take to achieve our childhood dreams? What do our ambitions teach us about ourselves? Since its publication in 1998, Homer Hickam’s coming-of-age memoir Rocket Boys, about the […]

A Review of the Monk’s Work, Teachings, and Legacy 1 Year After His Death Known for his teachings on Buddhism and how to bring mindfulness—the idea of being aware of […]

The woman, in order to have sex with her husband, had to write it all out after it happened. When they were young, before the kids, and they had sex […]