A poem by Valerie Salerno
March 3, 2025
It didn’t quite make sense to me when they said that the nightmare that ruined everything, split time in half, put different pieces of me in different places, was gonna be over. I wasn’t sure what it meant. Where did everyone go?..
Walter Lucken IV
February 10, 2025
A poem by Anna Sysling
January 6, 2025
A poem by Valerie Salerno
December 23, 2024
Owólabi Aboyade
November 25, 2024
A poem by Valerie Salerno
November 18, 2024
Lux Laine
November 4, 2024
A poem by Jaxon Kolhoff
October 21, 2024
With closed eyes, my nostrils fill with a metallic perfume. warm sweat. earth. a dampened cave...
A poem by Anna Sysling
October 9, 2024
It took me 40 years to find the edge of the lands.
Had my head in books with the chickens
Scratched out living
At this late stage of the game,
We’re all actors playing roles...
A poem by Owólabi Aboyade
August 12, 2024
A poem by Anna Sysling
June 27, 2024
A poem by Karpov
April 22, 2024
I visited Greenfield Village on December 26th. Fires burned in front of houses, it is holiday nights. I went up to the Webster House, and curiously, as I recall it, the house moves and grows and slips into the dark. For some inexplicable reason, thighs against the thick, red-velvet rope, I slip into a dream state...
Antonia Piedmonte-Lang
April 11, 2024
Sometimes the internet feels like endless work: ai porridge, uncloseable ads, outlook search and rescue—terror and celebrity simultaneous. Maybe once you turn off notifications you will find enlightenment. For me, zen is Facebook Marketplace...
Grace Millard
April 8, 2024
Steam curls, dancing over a bowl of homemade lentil soup, warming the tops of my thighs sitting in front of a fire, tucked away in a friend’s backyard on Larkins Street...
A poem by Anna Sysling
March 25, 2024
A poem by Karpov
March 18, 2024
The inspiration for this piece comes from my personal experiences during the 2017 Mosul conflict, where I witnessed the devastating impact of war on the people and the environment. This piece offers a unique perspective on the complexities of war and the profound impact it has on those involved...
Karpov
January 29, 2024
My sister turned 15 last week. She plays the flute and studies all the time. She bakes cupcakes and tries to make friends. In the smartphone. hormone. hothouse. Called high school...
Anna Sysling
January 8, 2024
Last night I went to a broadcasters’ awards dinner where a woman in a silver sequined dress announced a local station’s prize for Best Breaking News Story of the year...
Anna Sysling
September 4, 2023
Feels so rehearsed, like a simulation. Another memory event. Over time it becomes easier to detach. I envision myself as disconnected from them, their spirits expelling out of their bodies. How can I hurt for someone who doesn't even exist?..
Marissa Jezak
July 17, 2023
Weird Magic is a snapshot of several moments that played out in my life over the course of a week or so. The synchronicities both benevolent and inconvenient that I share in this work all felt like tangible and cosmically-time invitations into a deeper level of witnessing and experiencing the present moment. In an ongoing effort to resist the engineered and addictive quality of this little dopamine slot machine in my pocket, I attempt to share (and maybe even celebrate) the absurd and karmic magic of my IRL experiences; while also noticing the ways that attachment to these little narratives that shape my days can be thrilling, self-limiting and entirely arbitrary all at once.
Anna Sysling
June 29, 2023
Can you capture the feeling of discovery? Balancing the territorial need to own our places with the curious desire to change our experiences over time. How often do we actively work to outweigh the fear of rewriting in order to see the world around us with fresh eyes...
Maddie Boyer
March 6, 2023
A fair fight is non-existent. You always use everything around and fight dirty and to the point if you gonna do it for real, in any kind of capacity for real experience that you might have as a human being, which by the way, I question more than agree with the fact that I am one of you, or maybe even the same alien race if that might be who you are...
Kirill Slavin
June 20, 2022
To Whom It May Concern: the name is JAK, I don’t beat around the bush unless I’m planting flowers there – here, I am lookin for a job and what else is new like ain’t we all? Trying to find the position of our dreams...
Joshua Kochis
October 11, 2021
These in particular I wrote over a holiday break, when I found myself avoiding my last round of seminar papers...
Walter Lucken IV
September 6, 2021
For the launch party, which was held outdoors in a very socially distanced empty lot, she asked me to write a poem about anything I felt needed to be said - to my hometown and the broader world. Pulling back the curtain - collecting the receipts, if you will...
MJ Slide
August 23, 2021
A creative flash non-fiction piece exploring our physical relationship to the sounds of the city from a newcomer's POV.
"Wear sturdy boots and withhold judgment. Open your mind's eye - feel it in your chest. It's gonna be ok."...
MJ Slide
July 26, 2021
You might ask who sent me. Well, I would remind you that those who my work loves, it cannot name. There will be some allusions here and there, maybe an argot or a jargon that the attuned ear can capture, but no names...
Walter Lucken IV
June 7, 2021
Demeter, past post flourish. a hag lost in mort carrying corpus. Seeker, Who is to welcome her summer?
Daisy
May 21, 2021
After a cloudy day of avoiding potholes, driving at sunset while everything glows orange is a necessary meditation. Driving around in a city this big introduces techniques and etiquette specific to the neighborhoods—learning when to roll through the lights or maintain speed while someone is stood in the turning lane is part of demonstrating respect for the areas passed through. Detroiters made the cars, and they make the rules too. Enjoy the view while it lasts and stay reckless...
Amelia Gillis
January 11, 2021
At TCF they scream “stop the steal”, we insist that there’s no evidence. We insist on science, reason, civil society, even democracy after it was a fiction all year. The water in the Catskills is so cold it stops time. I imagine I can float here for ten years, steeling myself for another 6 months of 2020. I’ll have all the answers when I get out of the water. The teenagers 5.9 feet away are from the future. Maybe that’s why I keep getting plucked out of the frying pan, to give them the pros and cons of civilization before our world is forgotten forever. There’s a lot to be said for it, which is why we keep ending up in a defensive position...
Walter Lucken IV and Dominic Palarchio
December 28, 2020
The machines came to gnash their teeth, and bite at me, in the winter of 2017. My sister with light blue blush, and the poison ivy, wound round her face in mourning, was eaten the day before. And our brother, smoke-blackened wedding chapel, dangling snaggle-toothed staircase, collided with ground, hardened mud and frosty dew, just the day before that...
A poem written from the perspective of an old house and an accompanying personal essay...
Christiana Laine
November 23, 2020
The goal of psychoanalysis is to turn neurotic suffering into normal human misery. Obsession as attempt to solve ambivalence felt to be dangerous...Smoldering reek of shame. Blood smiles out at me...You can’t turn it off. Diversion to diversion to diversion to diversion...
Levi Okla
September 7, 2020