Tonight we the living gather to meditate on death—while eating hamburger sliders, in fact, and pumpernickel crackers spread with pâté, plus celery and carrots and various berries and wine that comes in a box but is not that tacky college kind. The spread is part of the funeral home’s Life Well Lived package, which also …
My family feared white people. White people, after all, danced on our newly paved driveway, leaving gym-shoe footprints. White people threw rocks and rotten eggs at our windows. White people stole my family’s first big purchase, a ’72 Thunderbird that was found two months later—stripped—in a steakhouse parking lot off Cicero Avenue. White people were …
I’m walking into the quickening blizzardas if into a hunter’s dream— the flint arrow through my chest keenerthan earthly desire. Wherever I went teeth followed me, relentless as the shadowof the doe-eyed boy I thought I couldn’t live without. Long ago, lovemade all gestures of flowering possible on earth. Now I’m tired of livingon the …
I noted that I’d been writing the stories I wanted, kind of, but I’d also been including other people’s ideas of blackness. I started writing stories that contradicted some folks’s view of blackness but felt true to my actual world and my created ones.
The first line in Erin Slaughter’s poem “No Horses” is an answer to an unasked question: “Because giving pleasure is less vulnerable / than receiving.” In a tangle of image and interruption, the poem circles an unspoken force.
We’d like to recognize our editorial assistants, the volunteer readers who contribute their time and cognitive energies to our literary endeavor, without payment. We’d also like to share some of the kinds of comments that happen throughout the reading process
Search
You don't have credit card details available. You will be redirected to update payment method page. Click OK to continue.
