Poetry

does being queer engender a queer syntax?

By C. E. Gatchalian
the inconvenient problematics of the coloured fag. / thus this aesthetic of fracture and fragment. / across many cultures, the nobility of surrender. / literary shards stuck wholesale in the throat. /...

Keep It Dark

By Maureen Hynes
Who are the goddesses who fell in love / with each other? Which ones were punished / or celebrated with star-dom—captives / flung into the sky to cast nets of light /...

Marian’s Memorial, Plug-In Gallery

By Chandra Mayor
One day this will be all of us, / everyone I know and all that’s left: / sitting on plastic chairs in a dim / gallery room, sensible shoes, precise / new...

Dog-and-Pony Show

By Andrew Eastman
Let your great-great-grandma’s god’s / dogma be your seeing eye /   / and your hearing ear dog (good / boy!) and let its stride guide you /   / to let...
Contest Winner

Modern Mythologies

By Sandra Kasturi
Now let us tell each other many myths / in this modern era, this plaguy drag of years / marching ever toward the slow heat-death / of the unspiralling universe— /  ...
Contest Winner

The Truth about Starlight

By Leslie Casey
Last days of a semester spent teaching language, the semantics / of signifiers, to students, online 24/7, their minds soaking  / in a marinade of abbreviated voices, twitter and text / rendering...
Contest Winner

Past Tense

By Michael Fraser
Long before still images gathered into reels,  / faked and raked movement across canvas screens, / before our minds grew magnetic, and we unfurled / how the unseen tether held Earth to...
Contest Winner

Kitchen, Vicarious

By Medrie Purdham
The summer that dolphins were found to have a self-concept,    I housesat. / I read about them, turning before the glass,         /            ...
Contest Winner

Design Theory

By Sneha Madhavan-Reese
Stencil your hand on the cave wall;  / then come, let’s play cards. Mind the fire. /   / We measure time with isotopes. Since 1950, anyway. / Before that, we faked...