Dietland: When Your Female Protagonist is Fat and Stays Fat | A Review by Noël Duan

He Called Us N — — — s | Torri R. Oats

Memory is a strange thing. It revises, omits, reorganizes timelines, and wipes itself clean to protect us from experiences that are too painful to revisit. As I recalled a pivotal incident in my life, I was forced to confront the fallibility of my own memory and…

Hand Me Up, Hand Me Down | Jody Lisberger

From the moment Peggy tries it on, she loves the T-shirt. The three gray dancers, stick-figures, leaping across the white front. The high cut sleeves accentuating her muscular arms. The swooped neck curving right under the ridge of her collarbone. She can’t…

2 Poems | khaliah d. pitts

worn

you look like a well worn road
like many men have travelled
on the highway of your shoulders
and children have picked flowered weeds from the berm
in your palms
you look like time has blown
the rogue from your cheeks
and the luster from your hair
like…

Holy Like That | Barbara Harroun

Joanne takes one look at me and saunters to the juice fridge. She hands me a cold V-8. She doesn’t say anything, just gives me her look; part-disappointed, part-pissed, part-what-are-you-doing-with-your life.

Repeal the 8th Amendment | Clare Foley

About the piece: I am fascinated by Irish politics and feminism. Currently in Ireland, there is a feminist movement to “Repeal the 8th amendment to the constitution”. This amendment means that horrific human rights violations have occurred in the area of bodily…

Full and Plum-Colored Velvet | Anne Graue

I never saw The Electric Horseman.
I was making out in the back with Mark,
my first real boyfriend, in the velvety
rocking seats in the expensive Glenwood
theatre in Overland Park; I never saw
the lighted cowboy suit or Robert Redford
kiss Jane Fonda. If he…

Faith in a Folder: Words and the Savage Search for Motherhood | Robin L. Flanigan

I wrote it all down. The procedures, the pregnancies, the losses. It’s all on torn notebook sheets and the back of to-do lists, between receipts for fertility drugs and an article about the…

Poetry Response Ability (a manifesto) | Trish Hopkinson

“Today I realize that my text is not going anywhere — except to meet itself.” Octavio Paz

Writing and reading poetry helps me interpret the static in my world — the noise, the many alternate voices; and to…

new names for brown baby girls | Orooj-e-Zafar

after Danez Smith

- the bark of old gum tree
- zulnorain
- palm creases wise with war
- first breath after three funerals
- war-drum in the distance
- allowed to cry above the burial ground
- reborn with the moon
- sworn…