S Derrick Austin Sadness Isn’t The Only Muse I still love books where nothing happens, / good or bad. The page is one landscape I move through.
t Maurisa Li-A-Ping to the fxck gxrls at sea: my father only called me during his lunch breaks or on his way home. he never saved my number in his motorola flip phone.
U Sjohnna McCray Unarmed This // is how the new grief travels, blackboys / digitized and hanging—light years away.
O Jacob Saenz Once I Carried a Pediculus Head Mom used a thin black comb to roam / my skull & pulled from it tiny-legged creatures / eager to escape the bars they nestled in.
G Angbeen Saleem Ghazal by/to/for Qandeel Baloch If you can bloom anywhere, honey, do it in a loom, / let joy be stitched in the space between god and your eyes.
P Nathan Spoon Poem of Thankfulness Today i am thankful for morning frost / touched by sunlight and sparkling / on lawns and fields
B Caitlin Feldman Bloom Four months with my mother, and my house plants remembered what it meant to live.
W Dara Mathis Water Will Carry You Home The bay in my backyard always looked its most vulnerable at low tide.
T Eva Recinos The Year the Gate Came Up As a kid, I noticed how my neighborhood unfurled in patches of uneven sidewalk, tufts of grass decorated with empty chip bags and broken bottles.
R Erica Trabold Reality, the Great Adventure Imagine my bed queen sized and still too small, old and imperfect like my country.
A Kenneth Carroll A Charles Brown Christmas Willie heard the hollow footsteps of his father’s worn black work boots coming up the cracked walkway and prayed for him to be sober.
T Chelsea Sutton The Floating Woman You hear this story about a woman who no longer bothers with gravity.
