Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: Today’s miCRo is a lively poem with surprising turns of diction and syntax, as nouns mutate into verbs and adjectives. As the title indicates, the poem is aware of itself as poem but isn’t limited by that conceit; it’s not a proverbial noisy gong but an energetic dance. Holy mackerel, …
(To use the PDF embedder to see all pages of the poem, use the arrows on the bottom left-hand side.) See more poems from Issue 20.1 by purchasing a copy in our online store. Digital copies only $5.
Assistant Editor Caitlin Doyle: In “The Sun,” Alex Dimitrov explores both the beauty and peril inherent in the sun’s “exacting brightness,” a light that simultaneously brings revelation and threatens annihilation. Dimitrov’s sun acts as a figurative gauge of the tension between concealment and exposure in our emotional lives. If many humans through the ages …
Associate Editor James Ellenberger: What young kid isn’t enthralled with the world of enormous old bones that were once thunder lizards? In mixing dinosaur-themed language and imagery with that of baseball, Jonathan Riccio urges us consider the many histories that make us, well, us. I’m particularly fond of how, in resisting one history for …
It takes very little to become a difficult patient. Having questions, feeling unexplained or anomalous pain, being uncajoled, seeming nervous for one’s first dose of chemo. The nurse looked at me sideways as I walked into the chemo-complex, and asked, “Are you all right?” as if I should have been. As if I looked excessively …
Assistant Editor Molly Reid: This piece of flash nonfiction pulls no stops. Despite the apology of the title, Jenifer Lawrence lays the scene for us with raw, unapologetic honesty. Through juxtaposition—a dead decapitated seal found on a beach and a fraught moment between the speaker and her son—Lawrence digs into feelings of regret and …
I am sleeping when the pain starts, dreaming of full hospitals and empty classrooms, a dark tunnel, dates on a computer screen, a diminishing roster of students, dead links, a riot of wildflowers—yellow to orange to code red—a superbloom of fires. My body jerks. My eyes open in the dark, and I am sucking air. …
Editorial Assistant Madeleine Wattenberg: I fell asleep halfway through reading Kim Kyung Ju’s I Am a Season That Does Not Exist in the World (Black Ocean, 2016) and dreamed that a neon pink cobra hid in my shoe and bit my big toe. I mention this both because it is not unlike what it feels like …
Piya has just turned thirty. She works in her family’s hotel. Tonight she will become pregnant. In twenty-some weeks, she will lose the baby, and the state of Indiana will sentence her to twenty years in prison for feticide. One year for every week. But for now, it is early on Tuesday, and on Tuesdays …
Search
You don't have credit card details available. You will be redirected to update payment method page. Click OK to continue.