We were on the roof of Nikita’s house, drinking beers. This is in the Central Valley. The roof was black and, so, hot. It wasn’t summer yet, but almost.

Lobsang kept saying that crossing fates with me would get him killed. When we first got on the road, an old woman at the foot of the mountain had been…

Monica Youn is one of the most brilliant people you will ever meet. This seems to be a shared consensus among the people I know who have also met her.

Farah Ali’s novel, The River, The Town (Dzanc Books, 2023), set in an unnamed municipality in the south of Pakistan, reads like an eerie fictional mirror to an Amnesty International report released the same year.

When I get to heaven I will be bruised / and I will not answer any of God’s questions.

A drowning person will not splash and wave, will not shout or call out for help. Contrary to the ways in which it is dramatically performed on television and in film, drowning is nearly always physically unexpressed, measurably silent.

When my mother left for the man with a cruel son, I kept / my nails sharp for when he would draw back, swing. I left

I met Christine during a balmy summer at the Winter Tangerine workshops in New York.

Through the logic and lens of horror films, Reed examines the market demands of poetry (yes, these do exist), academic life, and the anxieties produced by the COVID-19 pandemic and rising fascism.

My father said there were no other / words like the compound words / in the Armenian language.

Site is a four-part series of visual poems/essays/works. Each work reproduces the Trinity Test site in New Mexico—the location of the first atomic blast the world has known—at specific moments in time after the detonation.

an exercise in mining the worst possibilities from the ridges / of the brain absent of stalagmitic reach

“atmospheric river” they say, as if we are children, / as if air was water, as if all was just one phase change away

Beauty also is unaccounted for. / The mist is merely what it is: water

I grew up immune to the ordinary, surrounded by a past / I was expected to sit on and memorize

Fady Joudah’s newest poetry collection […] (Milkweed Editions, March 2024), written during the bombardment of Gaza from October to December 2023, marks the loss of language during an ongoing genocide.

I’m writing a book about fires. Metaphorical and literal. About the way human relationships spontaneously combust. How a self crashes and burns.

Reading my grandfather’s notebooks, I’m trying to / know madness as a way of searching.

As a Californian, Daniel Gumbiner has thought a lot about the aftermath of disaster. What happens long after the emergency workers and news cameras have gone home?

I have known Joshua Burton since 2014 when we attended the Boldface Workshop at the University of Houston.

i know you’re thinking of me: it’s just about to rain.

We leave our offerings. We prepare the meat the way / we were taught, snap the wing, relish the song of crack

Lisa Teasley’s first three books, Glow in the Dark, Dive, and Heat Signature came out in 2002, 2004, and 2006 respectively.

I was twenty-seven when I saw him again, at a birthday party for my sister that uncomfortably straddled the line between our broke college years and some recently adopted bourgeois values.

before their war, the Aqlla served / overflowing quinoa milk / to unworthy undeserving grins

And yet: my work is labor the way love is labor, is liability, is constant risk assessment.

I grow daffodils now, try to reimagine / night and pretend that doors are / simple.

Mazin, our first, arrives in 92. He comes out at three and a half kilograms, which the doctor tells me is normal.

I can still feel / my father’s hands / pulling my hair / into a rough ponytail

The Devil knew exactly where to go. There were plenty of places in the world where the sun slanted long across plaza stones and shone like diamonds in the spray of fountains.

Jami Nakamura Lin is a Chicago-based writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Electric Literature, and Bat City Review, but you might know…

How to enter my own waking so that I might feel alive. I often want / to lay down in the snow now. To be a little numb, at first, / as I’ve been since I gave birth & my bones became trestles / yielding other worlds.

a man gives just enough / to thunderous applause / and we made a statue/ of it.

We talked about light and dark, how to render it in paintings and drawings, and how it connects to spirit. We talked about Emerson and Thoreau. They connected their faiths to mine, to the pantheism I developed out there in the woods, and to art as faith. As I worked with artists in prison over the next couple of decades, I continued to see this transcendental connection to light and dark through their eyes.

THE FIGHTING CONTINUES // as daily 30 corpses / continue life performing the same / highwire act // Long-established toponymy / today it’s known by heart / that Tecoluca and San José las Flores / are noms de guerre / indications of the line of fire