Ever since Ramona debuted her prosthetic leg at school, she’s walked the school halls with her head a little higher.

The central event of the first story in Giada Scodellaro’s debut collection, “The Cord,” is so shocking that I’ve been thinking about it for days.

I’m on the moon / your favorite place, how encouraged you were I left / my safety stars

I birthed her. And when I think back it is like / a nearly drowned head cutting the water’s surface.

Being queer comes with responsibilities: the pressure to be more steadfast in my convictions than my straight friends, to reinvent relationship models, family structures, kinship networks even if it means disappointing my parents by depriving them of a marriage ceremony and grandchildren, even if it means my life might never feel all that stable, even if I find it all somewhat exhausting.

Jai Chakrabarti’s fiction has a striking orality to it, a tone that emanates from his characters’ psyche and subtly permeates an entire story. On a 2022…

I swear / he yelled at me like I had plans / to set the field on fire in my sports bra

as i hover above myself thinking about our fathers / how they were ushered from the least to best known borough / how they were fed so soberly into the moloch’s mouth

The shoebill pesters its mother for a drink, says David Attenborough.

I drank the creek water until my eyes, until my eyes were prayers too.

The dogs are bored. The children are bored. I was never / a child

My father / carried me often like a dead deer // on his shoulders up the stairs to bed, / my arms and legs gripped before his body, // my fallen neck bobbing

Either way, whatever the city’s doing, it’s enough to change the color of the sky to this bone-white dome, the color of talc, and if they can take the blue out of the sky, they can take something from me. But it’s weird, not knowing what.

The summer my grandmother’s fugues started, my mom was working two jobs, one as a nurse at St. Joseph’s Hospital and another as a freelance secretary in a small translation house that sent her home with complimentary poetry collections that she read late at night by the weak light in the kitchen.

Every Sunday, I practice saying no in three languages.

Days I can’t feel you, I dive my body / into the deep end, pluck golden leaves / from the silty bottom, nearly drown

Music was serious to me — and so was anger.

I don’t ask anyone to pray for me

In her newest collection The Last Catastrophe, Allegra Hyde tracks ideas of  apocalypse and collective action from an intergalactic finishing school to…

We’re Facetiming from our apartments. I’m up in Inwood, happy that my housemates aren’t home but anxious they might return and overhear our conversation. Angie is in Carroll Gardens where she lives with her boyfriend Kyle, but she’s moving soon because her parents are closing on an apartment for her in Fort Greene. Whenever I express jealousy about this, Angie says it won’t really be her apartment because it’s an investment. Yes, I think. An investment you will inhabit and then inherit.

The book of Ezekiel opens / with a windstorm.

Time can mean grace for survivors of sharp ends. Like, how one afternoon, god meant finding your eyes. I’m trying to say thank you for teaching me how to quit arching away from the glass, how to lean in.

I’d always wanted this, I just didn’t know / to give it a / name.

We had been sent out of the house to collect turnips. I was thirteen and Yukari was ageless, I thought then, as anyone above twenty-five seemed ageless to me...

People are afraid of my memory and they should be.

With their hands clasped and knuckles squeezed white, the newlyweds descended the church steps. Flashing cameras froze the tossed rice in midair. Later that day at the crime scene, when the detective was handed the photos he could hear the grains clatter to the pavement.

A scatter of crows came to me / and I could not refuse them

In his award-winning debut memoir When They Tell You to Be Good, author and activist Prince Shakur vividly captures and decodes lived experiences that…

She’s always opening up / spaces in me.

The violinist made a little speech. “All music,” he said, “concerns life and living.”

I can’t write about breasts without thinking of damselflies stinging the surface of water.

When I ask him what his favorite kinds of pretzels are, he says rods. I tell him those are better than sourdough, but nothing beats traditional. He asks me how I define “traditional” and before I answer he tells me it’s subjective, that it doesn’t matter anyways.

Pinball takes place in a more liminal environment: those may be your physical fingers hitting flipper buttons and your real voice cussing out Bride of Pin-Bot, but your vision, your concentration—everything about you that’s more consciousness than body—moves outside of yourself and behind a thin layer of glass.

And it was ordinary, that year, / when the artillery fired blanks, / and the glass hail panicking / the crowd vanished / where it landed, / and there was no hail, / but only the prosody of sleet.

How much muscle one carries is the largest determinant of bodybuilding credibility, regardless of the degree of fairness with which it’s constructed, and by this metric, he was the one, not me, with the authority to dispense advice.

She’s there on one of those red-herring March afternoons that make you think spring’s arrived, when everyone pours outdoors gasping, like they’re emerging from underwater. Her parents’ house is the worst on the block, squat and ranch-style, and she’s on a sunny ledge, a small plane on her roof that’s eye-level out your window, where you’re sitting in the stuffy green chair trying to read a Lincoln biography.