36.2 Winter/Spring 2024


The History of Furniture

Brian Chander Wiora

I grew up immune to the ordinary, surrounded by a past / I was expected to sit on and memorize


Poetry, Fiction, & Nonfiction

Selections from JAGADAKEER: IN REMISSION

Lory Bedikian

My father said there were no other / words like the compound words / in the Armenian language.

Far From Our Beginnings: An Interview with Monica Youn

Z.L. Nickels

Monica Youn is one of the most brilliant people you will ever meet. This seems to be a shared consensus among the people I know who have also met her.

AQLLA

Alonso Llerena

before their war, the Aqlla served / overflowing quinoa milk / to unworthy undeserving grins

Derelict Children: A Review of The River, The Town by Farah Ali

Tayyba Maya Kanwal

Farah Ali’s novel, The River, The Town (Dzanc Books, 2023), set in an unnamed municipality in the south of Pakistan, reads like an eerie fictional mirror to an Amnesty International report released the same year.

My Work

Razi Shadmehry

And yet: my work is labor the way love is labor, is liability, is constant risk assessment.

The History of Furniture

Brian Chander Wiora

I grew up immune to the ordinary, surrounded by a past / I was expected to sit on and memorize

WE PRAY AT THE CAST IRON SKILLETS OF OUR GRANDMOTHERS

Shaina Phenix

We leave our offerings. We prepare the meat the way / we were taught, snap the wing, relish the song of crack

What Comes After

Rachel Sargent

I was twenty-seven when I saw him again, at a birthday party for my sister that uncomfortably straddled the line between our broke college years and some recently adopted bourgeois values.

MINOR DESTRUCTIONS

Mark Kyungsoo Bias

Reading my grandfather’s notebooks, I’m trying to / know madness as a way of searching.

Junction

Meg Kim

an exercise in mining the worst possibilities from the ridges / of the brain absent of stalagmitic reach

A Houston Crease in my Brain: A Conversation with Joshua Burton and Anthony Sutton

Anthony Sutton

I have known Joshua Burton since 2014 when we attended the Boldface Workshop at the University of Houston.

Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning

Angie Mazakis

A drowning person will not splash and wave, will not shout or call out for help. Contrary to the ways in which it is dramatically performed on television and in film, drowning is nearly always physically unexpressed, measurably silent.

Ellipses and the Unspeakable in Fady Joudah’s […]

Gemini Wahhaj

Fady Joudah’s newest poetry collection […] (Milkweed Editions, March 2024), written during the bombardment of Gaza from October to December 2023, marks the loss of language during an ongoing genocide.

Archipelagic Memory: An Interview with Christine Imperial

Maha Ahmed

I met Christine during a balmy summer at the Winter Tangerine workshops in New York.

A Man Remarks on the Gazelle’s Resilience

Julie DeBoer

I grow daffodils now, try to reimagine / night and pretend that doors are / simple.

fever dream sonnet with Francesca Woodman

Anthony Thomas Lombardi

i know you’re thinking of me: it’s just about to rain.

One Hundred Demons: An Interview with Jami Nakamura Lin

Christina Berke

Jami Nakamura Lin is a Chicago-based writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Electric Literature, and Bat City Review, but you might know…

Before the Body

Katie Condon

Beauty also is unaccounted for. / The mist is merely what it is: water

from This Household of Earthly Nature

Cody-Rose Clevidence

“atmospheric river” they say, as if we are children, / as if air was water, as if all was just one phase change away

Summer Dialogue #1

Sam Schieren

We were on the roof of Nikita’s house, drinking beers. This is in the Central Valley. The roof was black and, so, hot. It wasn’t summer yet, but almost.

Nail Harmony

Chrissy Martin

When my mother left for the man with a cruel son, I kept / my nails sharp for when he would draw back, swing. I left

The Poetics of Horror: A Review of Justin Phillip Reed’s With Bloom Upon Them and Also with Blood

Mathew Weitman

Through the logic and lens of horror films, Reed examines the market demands of poetry (yes, these do exist), academic life, and the anxieties produced by the COVID-19 pandemic and rising fascism.

Inheritance

Nur Kahn

Mazin, our first, arrives in 92. He comes out at three and a half kilograms, which the doctor tells me is normal.

A Kind of Constant Inner Traveling: Lauren Kinney in Conversation with Lisa Teasley

Lauren Kinney

Lisa Teasley’s first three books, Glow in the Dark, Dive, and Heat Signature came out in 2002, 2004, and 2006 respectively.

Site: Snow in July

Tyler Mills

Site is a four-part series of visual poems/essays/works. Each work reproduces the Trinity Test site in New Mexico—the location of the first atomic blast the world has known—at specific moments in time after the detonation.

Virtue

Rob Macaisa Colgate

When I get to heaven I will be bruised / and I will not answer any of God’s questions.

Little Finger

Mu Tang translated by Kevin Wang

Lobsang kept saying that crossing fates with me would get him killed. When we first got on the road, an old woman at the foot of the mountain had been…

Tibidabo

A.C. Koch

The Devil knew exactly where to go. There were plenty of places in the world where the sun slanted long across plaza stones and shone like diamonds in the spray of fountains.

Fire Blanket

Clara Chow

I’m writing a book about fires. Metaphorical and literal. About the way human relationships spontaneously combust. How a self crashes and burns.

Jumping into the Fray with Daniel Gumbiner

Biz Rasich

As a Californian, Daniel Gumbiner has thought a lot about the aftermath of disaster. What happens long after the emergency workers and news cameras have gone home?

Many Steeples Would Have to Be Stacked One on Top of Another to Reach From the Bottom to the Surface of the Sea

Annie Woodford

I can still feel / my father’s hands / pulling my hair / into a rough ponytail


From the Archives

_________ trash

Nikki Ummel

i don’t want to ___________________ about this.

Down in Yellow

Kyle Lung

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 from me. But it’s weird, not knowing what.

The Moss Takes Us to an 80s Sex Shop

Karyna McGlynn & Fez Avery

But we arrive to find it’s been co-opted by a cocktail bar. / The Moss wants to bounce but we’re already here.

LOVE POEM TO LINE BREAKS

Nora Hikari

A LINE BREAK IS A LOVELY THING SEE IT'S NOT EXACTLY A PERIOD OR A COMMA IT'S KIND OF LIKE A HALF-BREATH OR A MOMENTARY PAUSE OR THE "MA" BETWEEN YOUR CLAPS OR A KNEE LENGTH DRESS I MEAN A LINE BREAK IS A KIND OF COURTESY