Photo by Stefanie Jockschat on Unsplash
Waiting & The Sand of the Syrian Desert Apologizes to the Armenians
anxiety / me
I wake up with urgency’s sandpaper clawspawing at my throat. I crunch downon my breakfast bowl of rusty nails, each bitepumping iron into my veins. My shadow whispers in Morse code, dotsand dashes of dread tapping out each deadline.I wear my panic like a fur coat in July,heavy and sweltering—yet soft and lush. The bedroom’s clock ticks: a cricket on amphetamines,each second a shriek; a…
Something I Might Mistake For Beauty
At my appointment with the first doctor who might finally name the nebulous illness I’ve suffered with for seven years, the intake form requests I list my symptoms; a hazard of myprofession that every ache manifests in metaphor. I want to fill the page: Snake-pit gut, nerves a swarm of needling wasps, joints riddled with buckshot, limbs like a slack-stringed marionette, brain a tinned peach…
By Hand & Proverbs
By Hand You stood at some imaginedprecipice complaining aboutthe circuitry of your skin the way the cells weresoldered by a boy whosefather never taught him how. You remembered coweringin their workshop, the mooddull as grass or cars. A fine edge cut againstthe grain of sunshine babynear to where you never knew. You remembered but you don’tanymore and that’s the placethat touches you. All your resolve…
A Review of Slow Render by Jess Yuan
Jess Yuan’s Slow Render–winner of the 2022 Airlie Prize for poetry–is situated in a pre-post-truth world where capitalism, imperialism, and technology are still calculable and grieved on human terms, at a human scale. With the keen eye of an architect, Yuan organizes her first full-length collection and the speaker’s lyric unlayering in three parts, resulting in a decomposition where we encounter the speaker’s gradual derealization…