35.2 Winter/Spring 2023


Prince Shakur’s When They Tell You to Be Good

Ishena Robinson

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 are undeniably his—coming-of-age as a queer, 20-something Jamaican-American Black man and millennial nomad. At the same time, these stories relate to many of us and the shared world we inhabit, particularly in these continually (and globally) tumultuous…


Poetry, Fiction, & Nonfiction

If You Aren’t Busy I Think I’m On Fire

Sreshtha Sen

Every Sunday, I practice saying no in three languages.

Every single one

Stephanie Staab

People are afraid of my memory and they should be.

Mother of Tomorrow

Caroline Plasket

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

GOING TO EUCLID

Ali Black

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

Beginning after the End: Allegra Hyde On Craft, Catastrophe and Collectivism.

Madeleine Gaudin

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

WHEN MY MOTHER DIED

Ali Black

I don’t ask anyone to pray for me

Pas Encore

Robert Herbst

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

EXPLICATION OF THE POET’S BREASTS

Kelly Weber

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

Remnants

Katie McMorris

The book of Ezekiel opens / with a windstorm.

Down in Yellow

Kyle Lung

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.

Carrie Buck

Caroline Plasket

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

Emily Dickinson Takes Off My Clothes

Meg Yardley

She’s always opening up / spaces in me.

You Can’t Go Wrong with Chicken Parm

Short Fiction by Kennedy Coyne

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.

Self-Portrait as Mother as Nature Documentary

Chelsea Krieg

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

Embodied, Explosive Worlds: Giada Scodellaro’s Some of Them Will Carry Me

Julia Brown

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.

Fugue

Matthew Lawrence Garcia

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.

Like Mother

Crystal Odelle

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.

Self-Portrait as the astral emergency you’re fielding on facetime

Sam Herschel Wein

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

The Date

Jessie Ren Marshall

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.

Myth-making and Myth-breaking: An Interview with Jai Chakrabarti

Tayyba Maya Kanwal

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…

Autopsy

Doug Ramspeck

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

Still Life of Goat with Junipers, Palace Walls

Avery Williamson

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

semi-autobiography as SNL castmember

Anthony Borruso

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

Yukari Kneeling in My Mother’s Garden, 1994

Gen Del Raye

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...

Fruit 4 Fruit

Sam Herschel Wein

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

Evidence

Daniel Pope

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.

Weightless

Geetha Iyer

Prince Shakur’s When They Tell You to Be Good

Ishena Robinson

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…

The Rules for Watching

Melissa Darcey Hall

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

On Trying to Have a Child

Brynn Saito

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

This is Tradition

Eva Recinos

Music was serious to me — and so was anger.

I Dreamed I Was Venus de Milo

Julia Thacker

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

Baby Think it Over

Alyse Burnside

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.


From the Archives

3 Poems

Kamil Bouška, transl. by Ondrej Pazdírek

We're not here yet, and still the key aches in the lock. I am leaving, and it's as if I was returning

2 Poems

Alyse Bensel

A neighbor assures me not to worry when the dog eats / rabbit flesh flattened on the street. Uncooked bones / are not sharp enough to hurt, turn an animal inside out.

“A Perch From Which to Be Kind:” Mikko Harvey’s Let the World Have You

Kylie Gellatly

In Let the World Have You, Mikko Harvey plays with a kind of surrealism in this collection to confront a quiet grief—it is ambiguous. It is daily.

It is Hard Not to Love the Starvationist's Assistant

Ander Monson

The job description was accurate: Assistant Needed for Commercial Body Modification Project was what it read, and Sherilyn was excellent at assisting, having done it most of her life.