Gulf Coast Online Exclusives


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


Chicxulub Köçekçe / Pioneer Species

Kenan Ince

Like those jellyfish that swell with future oxygen, / I live into my gender, balloon constantly rising

By the Light of Other Suns

Janie Paul

We talked about light and dark, how to render it in paintings and drawings, and how it connects to spirit. We talked about Emerson and Thoreau. They connected their faiths to mine, to the pantheism I developed out there in the woods, and to art as faith. As I worked with artists in prison over the next couple of decades, I continued to see this transcendental connection to light and dark through their eyes.

Dead Matter

Katharine Coles

Not fossil not decay unfurls / A shining ladder and makes / Rescue all. In movies / Lets loose, tears off

Bright Perfection

Nancy Au

The chicken crows at midnight. Crows at four o’clock in the morning. Crows when it rains. Crows when the sun sets. Crows when sirens blare down our street. Only stops crowing to eat.


From the Archives

Silent Guest

Susana Corcuera, trans. Clara Sullivan

Morning comes and he pauses beside my bed. He struggles to breathe, his breath brushing my face. Without opening my eyes, I make a space where he can curl…

The Paradox

Kit Haggard

The books feel farther apart on my nightstand; the tub has shouldered open, wide enough now for two; space seems to have grown between the sugar and creamer on the breakfast table, and despite the silent chess game Renée and I play with them as she reads the paper and drinks cup after cup of coffee—the cream now advancing, now slinking back in retreat—I somehow can’t bring them together.

Perfect Kill

Caroline Sutton

Dragonflies are like Waze. They predict. They don’t chase after mosquitoes, they intercept them, which means they have to calculate the mosquito’s distance, speed, and trajectory. Dragonflies perform these calculations in milliseconds, far faster than Waze, which always takes agonizing seconds to load as it computes the route, average speed of drivers, and quagmires that might await.

Darling, Every Day I Wake Up Afraid

Urvashi Bahuguna

Fresh from the ER, I drove round a parade / ground empty but for peepal trees and a row // of slumbering buses.


From the Blog

Losing the Plot: On Lauren Berlant's Desire/Love

In their entry on love, Berlant writes that we tend to (mistakenly) use the objects our desire attaches to in order to assume an identity— “you know who…

Feeling Political

For Berlant, part of the problem of politics is that marginalized people have to accommodate the feelings of their majority counterparts in order to successfully…