Amuse-Bouche

Living on Sandy Hook Bay in New Jersey gave me a personal stake in global warming. Superstorm Sandy took a devastating toll on our neighborhood and our beach. I completed the Rising Series five years before Sandy. The series helped me to express the fear 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina imprinted on my psyche. Each year as the destruction from storms stretches around the globe […]

Sherri Cornett’s German immigrant and pioneer roots are set deep into the homesteads around the small south Texas town of Cuero, where both of her parents grew up, met, and married. By the time she settled in Billings, Montana, in 1993, she had lived in eleven cities and, in some of those, several homes. Out of […]

[fiction] 4 My babysitter is an old bat. Old and mean. She makes me drink water standing by the kitchen table. She won’t let me sit down. After I drink, she pushes me back outside to play. She won’t let me in until lunch at eleven. I play with the other kids in the yard. […]

Tami Haaland is the author of three poetry collections, What Does Not Return (2018), When We Wake in the Night (2012), and Breath in Every Room (2001), winner of the Nicholas Roerich First Book Award. She earned a BA and MA in English literature from the University of Montana and a MFA in creative writing and literature from Bennington College. Her work […]

[creative nonfiction] Where did it begin, the pain, the images that haunt me? — La Prieta, Gloria E. Anzaldúa Tyler Clementi was eighteen in 2010. Before he ever became eighteen, he was a toddler. He was a kid with exceptional abilities, and he was known to have taught himself how to play the violin, accompanying […]

The poet Vijay Seshadri said that “the purpose of poetry is to deal with unprecedented experience.” Poets will use unprecedented language, but few have made poems mostly made up of entirely unprecedented words. Jos Charles’s feeld accomplishes just that, living in an invented and unnamed dialect that is as new as it is familiar. Her […]

i dream about time i dream, that it loves me that time will give Black Bodies more of itself this poem is about a universe where time runs the world this poem is about a universe where time aint got no time for Black Bodies a universe in which time plays chess with Black Bodies check mate. the speaker of […]

[creative nonfiction] “Every year, hundreds of thousands of American families become homeless, including more than 1.6 million children. Even a seemingly minor event can trigger a catastrophic outcome and catapult a family onto the streets.” The National Center on Family Homelessness   December in Philadelphia had closed in fast, with a sudden shift from the […]

Originally from Moldova, Ruth Madievsky is the author of a poetry collection titled Emergency Brake (Tavern Books, 2016). Her poetry and fiction appear in Tin House, The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a second poetry collection and book of linked short stories. When […]

Ming Holden’s essay collection is an experiment. Equal parts essay, memoir, and poetry, with a dash of fiction, Refuge: A Memoir bends genre to immerse readers into the lives of the refugees and political exiles Holden has worked with throughout her life. From Syria to Kenya to China, Holden explores the circular, repetitive trauma that refugees […]

1. The City on the Hill haunted by all manner of gunshots & protest signs & constricted throats of umbrage. Pundit wolves gnawing at the ballet- slippered sheath of flesh-glazed bones: Poverty is a state of mind. The cloy of fear a cheap perfume-scented cover for panic wafting from corporate person-hoods of deceit & profit […]

[fiction] Kamla has been through labor five times before in the past thirteen years, but the pain is still unforgiving, shaking and splitting her body. The village lady-doctor, Doctorni, fans Kamla’s face with a tattered punkah in the tiny two-room hospital in Bihar, India, and asks the tall nurse to boil some water. The nurse […]

it is three o’clock in the afternoon i am asleep when your principal calls the day has eaten its way through my eyelids you cannot know the little things when you call me i am asleep it is the only thing that stops the crying you cannot know the little things how easily i come […]

Summer of the three-cylindered engine, weeks spent thumping the wheel to tinny songs with a revolver stashed in my trunk. Johnnie on Snake Hill, pouring gas on the armrests of an old recliner, setting it on fire, watching the polyester open like a sore. Off 280, river scum lapping over rocks, their gray faces stained […]

torrin a. greathouse (she/her or they/them pronouns) is a genderqueer trans woman & cripple-punk from Southern California. Her work is published or forthcoming in Bettering American Poetry, Muzzle, Redivider, BOAAT, Waxwing, The Offing, Frontier, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She is the author of two chapbooks, Therǝ is a Case That I Ɐm(Damaged Goods, 2017) and boy/girl/ghost (TAR Chapbook Series, 2018). […]