I haven’t said my skin is ash. I hyperpigment where the band of my sports bra rests, where a racer back runs rigid between my blades, where my favorite strand of pearls wants to lay. I sliver tiny shavings of my skin where these polka-dots amass. I fragment, and I flake, but I fold myself…
A straightened line of cold rounded sand still manifests itself in a circular formation of lost privileges and guarded chances, falling, tumbling, surrounded in a broken mist of past ignorance, sealed by hot assurances of desire and want, hidden by incremental degrees of solitude and hope. by Joseph Buehler Joseph Buehler lives in…
and green and fresh as a cucumber pickle, sharp in the mouth, and soft green too, soft and new as the sweater you bought me, holding me young. As young as love, a humble sip, the smallest sip of warm green tea, grounded like gymnasts learning to stick fast to the landing. As…
This blood is a waltz at dawn. A soul splinters on the ground, a thousand red vessels smashing to pieces. The doctors take pictures instead of putting it back together. A human soul—the honeysuckle leaking out. The janitor comes instead, leaking capillaries brushed away beneath a Bauhaus mop. by Ruohan Miao Ruohan…
The Dying Sister You fell in slo-mo like a mimosa petal caught in a small breeze, sprawling, nearly soundless, on our parents’ speckled linoleum. I, five years younger, didn’t know you held your breath to make yourself faint. I didn’t know you’d whittled yourself down to taut skin over sharp bones by spitting meals…
Notes To Myself When you are an American in a Middle Eastern country, do not walk alone; your bare arms will betray you, your sandals become stone. Walk lightly; the shadows behind you are not yours. Anyone can change in the blink of an eye. When in another country, do not fall in…
