After Jennifer S. Cheng 1: the sea captured in a glass 2: a homophone for having enough for leftovers, a synonym for abundance 3: the fish, who have already forgotten you. It’s not personal 4: where memory fails, there’s still imagining 5: you. Not as an ocean but outside 6: glass and/or acrylic
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The Arrest, in all its surreal narrative trappings, supercars, and Hollywood theatrics, wants to know if words can save us in a dystopia.
Winner of the EXTINCTION Essay Contest, selected by Lacy M. Johnson
CHARLES YU is the author of three books, including the novel How to
I come home sad so I slice potatoes thin and fry them with oil and onions, keeping watch to flip at the perfect time, right when they crisp up golden. I remember
Chaco Canyon yesterday, impulse after reading the Childs stuff. Many years of wanting to go. I thought it took 5 hours or more but driving a little hard it was only 3.5.
because there’s something I should tell you,⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀but you’ll need to come to me. I reachand the rock of me stays,⠀⠀⠀⠀ just here where I’m mortared— ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ I must, then, own my arms,
All around is a dark sea threateningto swallow challengers – boats approach in failed attemptsat reconciliation, boiling over⠀⠀⠀⠀ at the hull with sailors shaped like menmouthing tame loose-lipped⠀⠀⠀⠀ apologies. Mumbled voices blanket
I.I sweep my porch in the sticky Georgia heat. I sweep, sweep, sweep like the dirt and the stray pine straw and the single bird feather will disappear as easily as the
At Waitomo, New Zealand If there is no heaven I’ll make due rest my head in the cave of constellations. Look up at The Milky Way pressed against stony pomegranate flesh.
Matthew Woodman teaches at CSU Bakersfield and is a graduate of the IAIA MFA program in Santa Fe, NM. He is the author of This Is Not Your Moon, and his poem
Our bracken pool tidesin the small of your back. I move the earthor the earth is you or⠀⠀⠀ the earth moves usthick in the shadow-dark air.⠀⠀⠀ This once gravityis the law we
I got our mouse. In a glue-trap on the basement landing. I shined my cellphone and it tried to free itself by undulating like this dancer we saw on Make America Fun
Solid Water I wait for the want to come inside of mewhile watching the morning commute near the Amstel. A stork on a houseboat does the samewhile hundreds of cyclists navigate narrow lanes. She