Issue 6
Featured
“Do not actually burn the bra. / Not on the fire escape. / Not in a trash can. / This isn’t an episode of Friends.”
“& your cum’s cooling too fast on my thigh / & your cum-sigh’s the hit single me / & my cumming replay while you’re away”
“Once, at the beginning of an important friendship, we pointed at a flag and joked, Can either of us write anything sincere about that?”
“At the Chinese buffet, my Father loves to try new foods. / We follow him. We keep up with suburbia. Keep up with the jonesing.
“Collage, like poetry, is a way to collapse time and space. Collage can be a portal, an altar, a way to visualize and make possible the impossible. A way to create new realities.”
“There is one butterfly marked of indecision, that doesn’t seem to want to stay put, yet in all its maneuvers never manages effective departure.”
“When I think of food, I don’t necessarily think of literal ingredients. Instead, I imagine everything that goes into community nourishment — the cultures, histories, lessons, family lineages, beloved recipes, social migrations, and geographical influences, each a form of resistance.”
“In those early and mostly uneventful trips to the OBGYN, listening to my baby’s heartbeat was a wilderness.”
“while I scribble my name on coastal skylines / of mass-produced cards, if only to trick you / into thinking I am in motion”
“The description of Promises of Gold/Promesas de Oro describes Olivarez as having “explore[d] every kind of love―self, brotherly, romantic, familial, cultural” in this collection.”
“from a torrent like a lion's roaring on a distant coast / as a breeze steals our breath away”
“They’re thickest in summer, skulk in the alleys, yawn on front lawns, scavenge restaurant dumpsters like rats. They have long, fleshy tails and hairy, pointed ears. They’re embodied, and also not, like how the word stray is both a noun and a verb.”
“Today, my Google search history includes what is the half-life of the human body? I came up emptier than I began.”
“Sing at the top of my lungs, pretend I am whistle-tone Mariah / as I whine my hips, a triple threat with my smile”
“Today is Pyramids Day according to a Redditor on the Frank Ocean subreddit / because the 199th day at 3:31am is the calendar year’s equivalent of when the / beat switches in that song”
“The third snake was unearthly / black // so deep it was hard to see at all / silver and lighter gray scales // catching light like the planets we saw / at Joshua Tree”
“In this poem, which is an attempt at condensing superfluous (elitist?) (white?) logic into bite-sized words, further packaged within the sonnet form, further stretched left-to-right, the poet analyzes…”
“I’ve always thought of Luther Hughes as a keystone in our contemporary poetic moment. There are few as dedicated to the good work of celebrating others as Luther, and I’ve been both grateful and inspired by their commitment to accessible literary spaces.”