miCRO: “River Body, Body Woman” by Jeneé Skinner
In this moment of collective grief, I’ve been thinking about how any individual griefs are heightened by the circumstances.
miCRo: “Pepe’s Curse” by Jessica Franken
In “Pepe’s Curse,” Jessica Franken captures the complex reality of being a woman in public.
miCRo: “The Neighborhood Girls Sabotage the Dairy Queen Order” by Allison Pitinii Davis
The formal cleverness of Allison Pitinii Davis’s “The Neighborhood Girls Sabotage the Dairy Queen Order” is hard to overstate. Davis teaches us to read the poem as it goes…
miCRO: “Favoring the Nightcap” by Chase Burke
The quiet but deeply uncomfortable tension that permeates Chase Burke’s “Favoring the Nightcap” will be recognizable to anyone who has ever suffered under the hard hand of generational trauma.
miCRo: “Detonations” by 신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin
“Modernity is a rust factory,” Sun Yung Shin declares in “Detonations,” a poem in which the technology of war brutally contrasts a natural landscape.
miCRo: “Waiting My Turn” by Jaswinder Bolina
“As someone who’s become obsessed with space flight lately, I admire how Jaswinder Bolina imagines its future and our future, one in which we—a much more inclusive we—regularly jet to other planets.”
miCRO: “외계인 | Waygyein” by Kat Lewis
Kat Lewis’s “외계인 | Waygyein” is a heartbreaking meditation on the otherness inherent in being a stranger in a strange land.
miCRo: “Assistant Guide” by Mary Ardery
Mary Ardery’s flash autofiction piece “Assistant Guide” gives the reader a glimpse into the addiction recovery community, where the specter of relapse, and its attendant violence, looms large.
miCRo: “Magnets” by Laurie Clements Lambeth
In her poem “Magnets” Laurie Clements Lambeth grapples with a reality familiar to people in extended quarantine: brain fog, a sensation she describes as “dulled, not knowing what was flesh or air or where—;”
miCRo: “We Are Preparing Every Day to Die” by Sarah Jane Cody
The true terror in Cody’s piece isn’t the science-fiction logic of numbing children to the idea of their own deaths, but rather how close to Cody’s reality we already are.
miCRo: “Housewives” by Anu Kandikuppa
In a time upended by quarantine, a time when so many women are shouldering extra burdens of housework and care work in the home, the exhaustion woven into these words is particularly acute.
miCRo: “Posies” by Dion O’Reilly
O’Reilly’s leap from childlike vulnerability to the terror of plague feels both timely and uncomfortably timeless.
