Just Is - Where There Are Black People in the Future
By Jaden FieldsIt is the steadiest “I love you”
Until the moon loses their footing in the sky
Which is to say - never
Or
I love you beyond time
Or
I love me beyond time
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Body Under Another’s Tradition
By Aliah Lavonne TighEveryone in Anatomy pairs up,
receives a small baby pig.
The scalpel shines like water or a mirror—if you look, you see
yourself: gloved hand pushing a blade to open
the other animal’s chest. Someone drops
a knife, shouts,
Clean it up. This is how we learn to
dissect a body.
Performativity
By Kat AbdallahMy teachers ask me
after seven months of genocide
if I’m holding up alright.
What the Fish Say / Over There
By A.D. Lauren-AbunassarMy godson wanted to go look at fish but I told him, today, beauty is canceled. We cried. I felt bad. I counted the unbeautiful like broken ribs. Shrapnel in the olive tree. Child-sized tourniquet. Saint Porphyrius’ watching and weeping. My father phones to tell me they’re down to vinegar; they pour into open wounds.
Shahrazad, circa 2024
By Aiya SakrOn the day of the first flour massacre,
nothing I have ever said has been untrue.
Fourteen thousand and three hundred white
PVC flags flutter in the early spring morning.
By the time I cross the lawn, the IDF have killed
another child, and another flag springs up
Like a poppy.
This simile is too easy.
When I am asked How Are You?? during the genocide of my people
By Janine Mogannam“I’m
pretty awful, all things considered. A few weeks ago
I couldn’t eat anything and now I’m constantly starving.
I know that’s a terrible thing to say.
I think my house plants might be dying but I’m not really sure?
They’re sad and limp-necked. I guess that’s a metaphor.
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Chasing Helicopters on the Way Home from a Bowl of Spaghetti
By Robin GowSomeone I love is turning into an asterisk
and so I am running and the vultures are
as hungry as they’ve ever been. The size of genders.
The size of fatherhoods.
PARADISE
By Gbenga AdesinaNorth of the country, a road led to the desert.
Dust was the first sentence. The Sahara
was a white darkness in the distance,
and beyond it the glint of a Great Lake.
We drove past fields of ginger and wild purple onions.
There was a public garden and a ring of white egrets
around still water.
Ode to My Older Sister, Letty, for Being the First in the Family to Go to College
By Jose Hernandez DiazI’m not sure if you knew it at the time, but you showed us, your younger siblings,
A great example. Maybe you were just happy going away to college,
Away from the responsibilities of watching over younger siblings all the time,
But I always remembered having pride when I’d tell people my sister
Is an English major and even more so when you became a teacher.
alternate universe in which family is abolished
By Tala Khanmalekhere, in this place,
we do not describe each other as family,
or even, as chosen
family. here, in this place,
we reckon with the ongoing past.