Cincinnati Review

In a searing and emblematic story, Claire Leng describes the experiences of a fictional family in 1959’s Great Chinese Famine.

A carpet of moss exhales inside an abandoned temple. A lone figure scrapes grime from a row of faded headstones. He brings flowers to a sunken patch of grass—chrysanthemum, hyacinth, pink lily mid-bloom—& lights a white candle beside the bouquet. Pacing the soil above his love’s stripped bones, upon the damp ground he kneels. Summer …

Will Musgrove approaches the topic of grief obliquely, from a narrator who imagines a memorial service they don’t attend.

She’s a healthy mussel. . . . She’s a wicked mussel. She’s a sliver of the liver of a river whose liver is sick. An ugly river, voluble with its complaints. I had this story from precisely such a river. Well, and so the credence you accord to trickling notes diluted and caught up in …

A sonnet about plants that almost feel sentient, in a meditation on longing.

A poem for those experiencing climate anxiety, with an unexpected turn in the changing environment