In early April of 2022, in the second month of the Russian invasion of and war on Ukraine, Phoebe Bosché, Editor of Seattle-based Raven Chronicles Press, invited me to interview Christine Lysnewycz Holbert, Founding Editor and Publisher of Lost Horse Press, as part of her Raven Chronicles’ “Raven Talks / qaẃqs” podcast.

a moon the size of Neptune / rising from the green muck like ectoplasmic / crossfire.

Now, I daydream about blue light, fever, freak weather. Once, it rained in late August and for several miles I walked beside B, both of us sharing an eggplant-purple umbrella, untouching except for when she’d wander past the umbrella’s brim and I’d tug her back into its orbit, its purple bruise.

Can you see the imaginary houses? The bed post? The night stand? The trail of blood / leading back to you and me?

Listen up! We’ve been getting our asses handed to us out there, and there’s no end in sight. I’m the best shot we’ve had at taking opposing bases down and reclaiming the map—until you showed up. Maybe we’ll stand a fighting chance. But that’s up to you and how well you handle that phaser.

The art cinema was a few blocks away from the lake, he wanted to take her there. She assented. He bought her a maple creamie and he licked his black raspberry with his thick tongue. They waited on the dock as the sun began to set.

you cannot grow faster than you can rot.

Like any good flame / I tapered, acquiescing / to my extinction.

In the realm of literary translation, few names resonate as strongly as Alex Zucker. With his extensive body of work encompassing Czech fiction, plays, subtitles, song lyrics, essays, poems, philosophy, and art history, Alex has firmly established himself as a prolific and versatile translator.

The poor burning garbage, the captain announces. Nothing, apocalyptic.

A headline reads: NASA warns alien life might not be fuckable. / An op-ed, hopefully.

Science wants me / to murder every loaf of bread in cold blood while / the pastries watch, so scared of me, they unbake themselves.

As a child, I drank black goo made from herbs so bitter it tasted like the earth. Mother taught me to / chase it with Haw Flakes, pink candy shaped like coins. Mother taught me to swallow many moons.

to go is to be gone; one day quick as a ship / wreck dignified by sea, I realize I am incongruent / to the lover that has slept asleep beside me

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.

They asked me where I wanted / to put my missing watermelon. / Not the watermelon but the missing / of it.

The boys are dancing. They prance around the dark stage in matching white shirts, striking a pose with their pale arms and pale necks. Seven cookie-cutter boys toss back their hair—bangs just skimming the eyes—then bend their narrow waists, fold themselves unbelievably tight, and launch into acrobatic flips.

Two hands pluck me from a river, / and unfold my pages to the sun.

If she emptied her hands / of this weight, my face / would fall from the ground, / scattering below her feet again.

Buried on the side of I-20, covered in red maples: the Pro-Life Memorial in St. Joseph, Iowa. A stretch of fenced-in earth, speared with a thousand tiny crosses for all the aborted “children” since 1973—

I am the woman who the writer could not earn enough money to see. He never finished the stories, nor the political articles. He never arrived on the train, we never stayed at the hotel. We were dating at a time when I hated the idea of old age. In other words, I was happy.

It seemed that porn had stunted the imaginations of most men. Their conception of sex was tied up in keywords and surface-level descriptors.

I am writing myself / into the mother of this poem

he can't sort mail or carry / library books to his car. he can’t give the tiny disco / ball dangling from his rearview mirror a spin.

Pain is uninteresting to everyone except the person who experiences it, and even then, the appeal wears off. I became bored by my own pain, afraid that I was becoming irrelevant, ceasing to exist. Who was I if I could not teach, could not parent, could not write? Pain makes a very poor companion, and rather enjoys maximizing presence so that no one and nothing else can occupy your time. I worried about Stockholm Syndrome: was I making nice with my pain or simply getting used to him?

I am your faceless someone bored/ / horny/mobile/available on a Tuesday afternoon/ / your memory taking root inside tighter skin

Let us recognise “dad bod” as another / crystallization of sexism.

Back then I was taking Estazolam. It had brought along bothersome but tolerable side effects. For the whole day I was clumsy and unsteady, and at night I'd hold the tablet pack tightly, unable to stop my craving. I studied your messages in drowsiness. Zolpidem and Lorazepam were what you recommended. They might make me feel better, you said.

When someone asks me what I do for a living, I give a different answer every time.

Source text: Fascinating Womanhood by Helen Andelin, originally self-published in 1963. These erasures were composed upon pages of the mass-market paperback,…

Inside his backpack at Yale Law School, as he aimed to become a public defender, 17 years after being imprisoned for a carjacking he committed at age 16, poet Reginald Dwayne Betts kept a sheaf of handwritten letters penned by an executed man named Glenn McGinnis. Some letters began with poems.

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.

Yet DanceNotes is uninterested in writing that aims to freeze lived experience. The mission statement continues: “If notation is an instrument for comprehension, preservation, and iteration, DanceNotes is an experiment in notation dedicated to refractory, malleable, and plural knowledges, and to re-contextualized genealogies of movement.”

to bury a Black body / not out of respect for life / but to prevent disease // and cut the stench / and if a cross is laid on / the mound of dirt

“Why must everything come to an end?” wonders a bit of sentient stomach bacteria in Yuri Herrera’s new story collection, Ten Planets. “Why had it begun to begin with?”

Do me a favor, brother, / what's all this about / summoning Death / for each / person to bear?

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

When I was 12, dad took me to the darkroom to help him develop film. He wanted to show me the enlarger, the dangerous developer liquid, and why red light won’t react with silver salt.

Blood, unruly emotions, and intense relationships are at the heart of work by both the US author Chloe Caldwell and the Ecuadorian Gabriela Ponce.

The refinery amid the marshland /of my earliest memories // repeats itself on the Gulf—

Reading Tamas Dobozy recently has been like hearing the chime of an antique clock in a crowded internet cafe.

The patient registration form wants to know about me. I leaf through its fourteen stapled sheets. There are lines for writing, boxes for checking and tables for completion of a story. Printed carefully, please.

i don’t want to ___________________ about this.

Source text: Fascinating Womanhood by Helen Andelin, originally self-published in 1963. These erasures were composed upon pages of the mass-market paperback,…

Jesus Christ let me get a witness / on my grave I don’t have a dollar / I barely even own my name.

The 1967 song written by the enigmatic David Bowie famously dramatizes a call and response between Ground Control and Major Tom, except that we don’t know whether the call goes through, and we don’t know whether the response is actually a response.

In your next life, you plan to be an animal / impenetrable by a knife.

After something like this, the rabbi told me, there are no good answers.

Throughout my father’s life, people often described him as a sage or clairvoyant, a blind man who could see beyond the visual.I was seventeen when I noticed the pattern. When an admissions officer at a small liberal arts college called me in for an interview, she spotted my dad and his dog in the waiting room.

  In fact, wir sein ready,Was das anconzernt.—Kurt M. Stein, Die Schönste Lengevitch, 1925 being on an island, having a child, writing, and having a…

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.

You can believe it or not, all of this / heartbreaking / drag

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