miCRo: “During the Cretaceous Our Country Was Divided for Sixty Million Years” by Martha Silano
In an era of political division, this imaginative poem by Martha Silano details a literal division of the US back in the Cretaceous period.
miCRo: “34D” by Dorothy Chan
In the prose poem “34D,” Dorothy Chan uses a number and a letter to conjure up particular images that the poem both mentions and undercuts, in a statement about the poetics of sex.
miCRo: “Anna Walinska” by Arthur Kayzakian
Arthur Kayzakian’s compact ekphrastic prose poem “Anna Walinska” navigates big-picture questions of art and consumption.
miCRo: “Magdalene” and “Easter” by Sonja Livingston
Two essays that grapple with the place of women in history, specifically an enslaved Native ancestor and a prehistoric “greatest grandmother.”
miCRo: “Santa Maria” by Natalie Yap
Natalie Yap’s story “Santa Maria” asks us to consider the unconventional ways we let go of life and each other.
miCRo: “Lori Cornelius” and “The Trespass” by Beth Ann Fennelly
In two pieces that feature mothers with dementia, Beth Ann Fennelly shows us again why her work is central to contemporary enthusiasm for the form of the microessay.
miCRo: “For All These Traces” by Anna Cabe
In Anna Cabe’s “For All These Traces,” the superfan of an unnamed K-pop boy band breaks and enters her idols’ hotel suite.
miCRo: “The Friar, as We Know Him” by Elias Hutchinson
In this poem’s world, which is, of course, our world, it’s the people swiping Game Boys from shipping containers who are struggling to survive.
miCRo: “Prairie” by Kirun Kapur
In “Prairie,” Kirun Kapur blends memory, landscape, and elegiac praise.
miCRo: “When I Am 317 Pounds My Friends Do Not Wait for Me to Catch up to Them on a Sidewalk” by Sarah Carson
In Sarah Carson’s prose poem, the act of waiting for someone resonates in the contexts of sizeism, empathy, and human relationships.
miCRo: “Aubade in a little ice age” by Sydney Goggins
Language and climate ebb and shift in Sydney Goggins’s “Aubade in a little ice age.”
miCRo: “About” by Mia Kang
In Mia Kang’s “About,” the stuff of writing is simultaneously texture, obstacle, and process.
