In poetry, our winner is Andy Chen, for his piece “Longing.” This year’s poetry judge was Porsha Olayiwola. Of the poem, she writes: “‘Longing’ manages to instill within its reader the same essence that the poem itself is after. That is, we read this poem overwhelmed in a sense of longing. The ellipses, ending or…
If we were to try to keep this even, or at least find the midpoint in this argument before anyone gets meanwe’d be golden.Let’s say when you said maybe we’re not meant to be with just one person I had responded with – what do you mean by being with someone – what do you mean by meant but instead, I swallowed the plumb…
Much of the earth has been eradicated before. I’m not going to stay awake and think about that. Sleep is important. Sleep is essential. Tomorrow I’ll be groggy and off-balance and there’s the possibility of falling and breaking a bone. I must not stay awake and think of the chained, the bombed-out, the starving. After all, love exists, people…
When I look down at my belly, the line therelooks back. Straight as a snake measuring its prey.Twice I’ve watched my midline muster stripeand thicken. Become open parenthesis, primed to holdthe past tense on display. What kind of magic bloomsa scar before the skin ruptures? I continue to findthe single wings of nine-spotted moths, monarchs.Stained…
My mother has never died yet.My father has died oh so many years ago.I have never died yet though I have not died from trying.What is the most profound tragedy that can befall a family?And the dream answered: The death of the primary wage-earner.My sister has never died yet though she believes she has been…
a delicate box. The child inside it. It’s okay to not think abouthow the child came to be in the box. It’s okay to focus solelyon what the child offers: the sound of fireweed bending in wind,yesterday’s pages torn from their binding, a small hand. Yesterdaythere was no sign of the child. No warning between…
“What’s for you won’t go by you,” he told me, the great, recalcitrant songwriter so heavy-browed with doubt and kindness. I was eighteen and had taken a Greyhound from New York to Nashville to find him, my corduroys indistinguishable from my self. That whole wolf-on-skates year his music had saved me, made me feel something…
I found a boat tied upat the water’s edge,rocking, rope frayed, oarsbanging in their locks. At home, you neverknew what mighthappen. A surprisea minute, they say. In the distancedark clouds, no traceof the other shore.It might have been wise to havebrought a compassand life jacket,to have packed a lunch.
We’d only just begun to scratch the floors with our own furniture, unfold the box flaps and hang the walls to look like our walls in the old apartment: familiar faces, fruits. Then we heard it, the long scrapes in deep grooves overhead. It came from the devil’s peak, after we’d turned the bedroom into the samedark as the…
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