Michelle Lin is a storyteller. Her work focuses on matriarchal family relations, diaspora, girlhood, and monstrosity. Michelle’s spoken word poetry is featured on Button Poetry and her other work is in The Offing, Contemporary Verse 2, Nowhere Girl Collective, among …
New Poetry
My Great-Grandmother Continued to Speak in a Tangled River of Greek
How many English words did my great-grandmother’s tongue
butcher before she was told to be careful? Be quiet.
When did she finally decide to let go of language? Surrender
to a world where phrases would never belong to her.
Once …
Cum Rag & relapse
Cum Rag
[now that there is a cum rag I curl
around for comfort] I don’t need
the silver blubber of another purse.
Give me Gatsby or enough THC
to forget Tennessee. Yes, the only
proof I exist is plastered …
Thread
I’m thinking of a gourd.
Maybe there’s a thread
inside. Like a thin
long thread.
It hangs from the neck,
searches to stitch, latch
with the stupefied gaze of a calf still wet
from birth.
Maybe I’m convinced
it’s from …
we were there at the slaughter
we were there at the slaughter
at the slaughter of Fala
not all of us are guilty;
someone—not I—held the knife
and someone—not I—gave the order
but there are no innocents among us
some of us were inside the room…
PERSONAS
circa Summer 2020
pixelated and clear / 5.5 inch screens spawn portals that yawn / faces oust doors
counterfeits of Edvard’s The Scream / the world mesmerized / misty –
eyes / our ery haze met / a pre-rapture rhapsody …
Flamingos Dance at Midnight & Storm Chaser
Flamingos Dance at Midnight
Storm Chaser
Lauren Kalstad is a poet, professor, and essayist. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Querencia Press, Rogue Agent, The Southeast Review, and World Literature Today. She received her MFA from New York …
feint & burrow
|
this is built from benign neglect |
a frisson scattered electric |
My mother tells me not to walk alone in the forest, so I drop my location on a pin. & Before He Duct-Taped his Million-Dollar Banana to a Wall, Mauritzio Cattelan Made “Daddy, Daddy:”
My mother tells me not to walk alone
in the forest, so I drop her my location on a pin.
Apples dangle. Trees in Pantone 363.
Shadows schooner fallen copper berries,
& I don’t need to be afraid because
there …
Into Myself
Needed not soft chicken but self-check-in,
typed again. Got stuck inside
a question of identification: extended
family or emotional relation, clicked
and unclicked—this went for with people,
too. The common moon surfaced
like a moon jelly, more jelly
than moon, …
