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...

My friends don’t come over to help me / sort through my mother’s things. / The ashtrays. The bills. The navy blue suits. / No one brings me a home / cooked meal. I don’t belong

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

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

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

People are afraid of my memory and they should be.

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

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

She’s always opening up / spaces in me.

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

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

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

The book of Ezekiel opens / with a windstorm.

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

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

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

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

Every Sunday, I practice saying no in three languages.

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, …

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 panel discussion with Hannah Tinti, the …