by aureleo sans — We’ve gotta arrive at the DSS office an hour early on the day they give out food stamps or else we will be there all day, and nobody is happy, and everybody is whining including Mamá, who’s saying why did I cross the Caribbean to come to this mentiroso country…

by Ruby Dunn — For Catherine T AND THE KITCHEN IS FOR ROMANCE // AND even after everything, I find my muscle memory still betrays me; That half-beat breath before I let the gate swing to, because in that moment I still half expect to wait for you. How long must we keep loving the old things that…

by Christy Tending — I love the way my child says make sure-ing, rather than making sure. I’m make sure-ing of you, mama. He tells me not to laugh. Remember, this is important. I love the way the cat’s paw rests on my hand in bed, in the dark, in the soft space between…

by Muiz Opeyemi Ajayi — for Deborah Yakubu “& you sister of my country burning & i am sorry & i am sorry & i am so sorry” — Othuke Umukoro quell the flames. rewrite the violence in crimson. there’s no sweet synonym for lynching. no metaphor adhesive enough to gather grey ash into brittle white bones. girl a…

by Chila Woychik — “We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence…” ― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek We learn to count by number. There were two raccoons and two snakes dead on this three-quarter mile stretch of road these past seven days. I have also…

by Christtie Jay — Mother, I can not call because the darkness that has befallen is brutal. Yesterday, walking my bicycle to work I almost lost an eye weighed by how hard it is not to throw a stone at the man you love when he says no to you collecting his coat and breathing in his…

by Hassan A. Usman — When we learn to spell joy, we lose our lips — our tongues perforated by grief. They said home is a place for merriment, but our meals poison the hand that made them. My mother applies a thick blush on her chin to withhold her cascading tears, yet is called…

by Eliot Li — When Perry was 8, Pastor George pushed him beneath the roiling waves of Ocean Beach three times, once each for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The pastor held him under long enough for the sin in him to die. The first time, the chill of the rushing…

by Patricia Q. Bidar — It was 1976, America’s bicentennial year. Skylab, the first US space station, had orbited earth for too long, and was failing. Angel-headed Peter Frampton, with his wahwah voicebox and fake audience members losing their shit, filled the airwaves. On the community theatre scene, Nidia and I were not children but…