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 …
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.
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, …
Music was serious to me — and so was anger.
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
The violinist made a little speech. “All music,” he said, “concerns life and living.”
Ever since Ramona debuted her prosthetic leg at school, she’s walked the school halls with her head a little higher.
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 …
In her newest collection The Last Catastrophe , Allegra Hyde tracks ideas of apocalypse and collective action from an intergalactic finishing school to a rehab center for internet addicts to a …
