by Atia Sattar but it’s less a returnmore a re-calling because when I was bornthe Azaan was whispered in my earand still echoes within because I tuned out Muslim at eighteento the boom of hijacked airplanescolliding with steel, untrainedin mindful listening, untrained in self-love because “I was raised Muslim”wasn’t cutting it everlike I could just…
Tag: poetry
Lily Kaylor Honoré
Naked Ladies You and I are in a forest of the safest kind. Central stars, skyscraper-fringed, bright neon. I feel you bow-curved around my back, threaded through me, taut. Bear fur is warmest under the arms and at the brown whorl of your underbelly. Hardened strands of tree sap, amber beads caught there. The paw…
Traci Brimhall
Long-Distance Love Poem as Alt-Text [A middle-aged woman in an unmade bed poses for her phone’s camera. She takes off her compression gloves and tries again, pushing the interdisciplinary erotica of star atlas and physical therapy brochures out of the way. She studies the photo’s fortunate failure to translate pain, how it reveals only a…
Annie Woodford
Soft, Softer A mess of rabbits, a messof squirrels. I remembertheir tiny bones, their falling-off flesh stewed in gravy.Sop it up with white bread,a salty thin savor tastingof the can of Bunker Hillbeef my granny would mixwith it and the quick heartbeatin the trees, the tremor,the brown fur, the pastureat dusk, the skin ripped offthe…
Malik Thompson
Cruising On the grounds of a torched cathedral,he empties himself into the stranger’s open throat—a fevered ruttingbeset with low moans & few other sounds: city crickets & their futile clamor,ghost bus hurtling through vacant roads— hour of black air & the leaden humof streetlamps. Moonlight pooling in the small of his back, he reachesout, right…