Jai Chakrabarti’s fiction has a striking orality to it, a tone that emanates from his characters’ psyche and subtly permeates an entire story. On a 2022…

I don’t ask anyone to pray for me

The central event of the first story in Giada Scodellaro’s debut collection, “The Cord,” is so shocking that I’ve been thinking about it for days.

Being queer comes with responsibilities: the pressure to be more steadfast in my convictions than my straight friends, to reinvent relationship models, family structures, kinship networks even if it means disappointing my parents by depriving them of a marriage ceremony and grandchildren, even if it means my life might never feel all that stable, even if I find it all somewhat exhausting.

We’re Facetiming from our apartments. I’m up in Inwood, happy that my housemates aren’t home but anxious they might return and overhear our conversation. Angie is in Carroll Gardens where she lives with her boyfriend Kyle, but she’s moving soon because her parents are closing on an apartment for her in Fort Greene. Whenever I express jealousy about this, Angie says it won’t really be her apartment because it’s an investment. Yes, I think. An investment you will inhabit and then inherit.

In her newest collection The Last Catastrophe, Allegra Hyde tracks ideas of  apocalypse and collective action from an intergalactic finishing school to…

Ever since Ramona debuted her prosthetic leg at school, she’s walked the school halls with her head a little higher.

I drank the creek water until my eyes, until my eyes were prayers too.

People are afraid of my memory and they should be.

The book of Ezekiel opens / with a windstorm.

Days I can’t feel you, I dive my body / into the deep end, pluck golden leaves / from the silty bottom, nearly drown

The violinist made a little speech. “All music,” he said, “concerns life and living.”

Either way, whatever the city’s doing, it’s enough to change the color of the sky to this bone-white dome, the color of talc, and if they can take the blue out of the sky, they can take something from me. But it’s weird, not knowing what.

I can’t write about breasts without thinking of damselflies stinging the surface of water.

Time can mean grace for survivors of sharp ends. Like, how one afternoon, god meant finding your eyes. I’m trying to say thank you for teaching me how to quit arching away from the glass, how to lean in.

With their hands clasped and knuckles squeezed white, the newlyweds descended the church steps. Flashing cameras froze the tossed rice in midair. Later that day at the crime scene, when the detective was handed the photos he could hear the grains clatter to the pavement.

We had been sent out of the house to collect turnips. I was thirteen and Yukari was ageless, I thought then, as anyone above twenty-five seemed ageless to me...

as i hover above myself thinking about our fathers / how they were ushered from the least to best known borough / how they were fed so soberly into the moloch’s mouth

I’m on the moon / your favorite place, how encouraged you were I left / my safety stars

My father / carried me often like a dead deer // on his shoulders up the stairs to bed, / my arms and legs gripped before his body, // my fallen neck bobbing

When I ask him what his favorite kinds of pretzels are, he says rods. I tell him those are better than sourdough, but nothing beats traditional. He asks me how I define “traditional” and before I answer he tells me it’s subjective, that it doesn’t matter anyways.

I birthed her. And when I think back it is like / a nearly drowned head cutting the water’s surface.

The summer my grandmother’s fugues started, my mom was working two jobs, one as a nurse at St. Joseph’s Hospital and another as a freelance secretary in a small translation house that sent her home with complimentary poetry collections that she read late at night by the weak light in the kitchen.

Music was serious to me — and so was anger.

In his award-winning debut memoir When They Tell You to Be Good, author and activist Prince Shakur vividly captures and decodes lived experiences that…

The dogs are bored. The children are bored. I was never / a child

A scatter of crows came to me / and I could not refuse them

I’d always wanted this, I just didn’t know / to give it a / name.

Every Sunday, I practice saying no in three languages.

She’s always opening up / spaces in me.

I swear / he yelled at me like I had plans / to set the field on fire in my sports bra

The shoebill pesters its mother for a drink, says David Attenborough.

The 1967 song written by the enigmatic David Bowie famously dramatizes a call and response between Ground Control and Major Tom, except that we don’t know whether the call goes through, and we don’t know whether the response is actually a response.

The town had been coughing since the dark arrived. It began while I was on the bridge the second time. Was still going when I went out for beer.

The old men are unsure. Something is twisting up and up to become a stair. And what is the end for? Who would stop here and dream such accumulations? Once…

Sometimes being best can be the worst. The prized antlers the wapiti so lovingly drapes with velvet and nourishes with aspen shoots can turn their caretakers into rumpus room decor, even though deerstalkers know perfectly well they could just wait for the elk to finish bugling its mates before picking up the discarded instruments for a song.