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

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

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 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.

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

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.

“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.

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…

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

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…

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

Before I am beautiful I'm in the hairdresser’s chair, / perched atop two phone books, holding my ear. My reflection / in the bathroom mirror is a landscape painting.

It’s still a question of how queer exhibitions can function within certain institutions without assimilating, without petrifying living works in order to propose additions to “the” hegemonic canon, but Tag proposes ways forward that walk indeterminacy with confidence.

Who called Mirrellez C. Elliott and told her that her son had died in police custody? How many minutes did it take for the police to drive De’Sohn from where he was arrested in New Haven to the police station at One Union Avenue?

I have only watched someone turn the auger, / Cutting through the obvious ice, in a belief / Of that which is swimming below. Neither of us / Was wrong…