miCRo: “Retail Therapy” by Molly Bess Rector
In Molly Bess Rector’s poem “Retail Therapy,” lonely girls go shopping. Across reflecting couplets, the surface of a lake in summer morphs into a department store window. Behind the window grows a garden of what was and what could be: “Oh, to dress / beyond ourselves.”
miCRo: “Kim” by Koss
This piece is invested in collapsing time, in freeze-framing and rewinding inexplicable violence.
miCRO: “Eid al-Adha” by Latifa Ayad
In less than 500 words, Ayad’s sweeping essay takes us from the speaker’s mother’s baklava to the rams sacrificed on the family’s farm to the “grapey surface” of a “dissected sheep’s eye.”
miCRo: Two pieces by Ji Yun (1724-1805)
In these translations, readers must counter assumptions about who provides narrative resolution and begin new understandings of old symbols as meaning accumulates and distills through the language.
miCRo: “Well Done, Middle School Administrators” by Julie Jones
This wicked sharp dreamscape begins with our tween-boy narrator and his father being chased through a middle school by a bear.
miCRo: “Before the Fiat” by Sophia Stid
This poem meditates on—and elevates—the word No in ways I haven’t seen before. I think, of course, of the issue of consent in intimate relationships, and the power that No needs to have in that context
miCRo: “Drug Dealer: A ’90s Whip Reel” by Kristin Robertson
From cars to cocktail napkins to Hennessy bottles, these snapshots create a coming-of-age story rich with heart and heartbreak.
miCRo: “사랑니: (n) wisdom teeth” by Su Cho
When the speaker discovers that “wisdom teeth” in English translates to “love teeth” in Korean, the poem unspools into a stunning reflection on false translation and the gap between culture and identity.
miCRo: “Three Filipinas” by Harrison Geosits
Geosits’s prose spans decades and moves the reader from “bug screens” in the Philippines to “Filet-o-Fish sandwiches” in America.
miCRo: “Epigenetic Inheritance” by Emily Franklin
“Epigenetic Inheritance” explores the stakes and fallout of inherited trauma, how we retain its traces in our cells and pass it down.
miCRo: “Music Indoors” by Adam Gianforcaro
Beyond the pleasure and surprise of such a fresh occasion for poetry, “Music Indoors” makes exemplary use of lush, atmospheric imagery and a slow, lingering pace to cultivate a kind of sun-drenched, Debussy-soundtracked pocket world…
miCRo: “Garden” by Allison Wyss
This juicy work of microfiction feels like the perfect tale to tell in the dark, with a flashlight under your chin.
