Featured – Page 5 – swamp pink

Dead Sweeties

October 1, 2026

Postcards just as inarticulate as the boy behind the wheel, sheets of airmail tissue (cheaper!) penned close with detail; a corsage with a blunt note: each missive begged mate me, an imperative I often obeyed, curious, unafraid, yet confused by the rough retreat, post-charm, post helter-skelter. A boxful of evidence however crude – even a...

Evening After Evening

October 1, 2026

Our King Lear has serious acne and every girl in summer camp is in love with him. Lear needs to wield a certain authority over the cast, a challenge when all your actors are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. Moira, the camp’s head director, picked Markus because he’s the tallest and has the...

Larson’s Pond

October 1, 2026

(For Tom) Sitting beside the water after hiking, it’s easy to let go, leg muscles tired from doing the work they love, carrying me up and down the steep ridges of the Driftless. Slouched on a wooden bench on the small, floating dock, I surrender to ripple and drift, dragonflies skimming the water in a blur of blue, the chitin of their...

Self Portrait

October 1, 2026

1. The Book Review praises a novel by a trans author, even as the same paper pushes anti-trans policies. 2. When I write, I am not building an edifice. I am collecting pebbles. 3. ‘Veronica’ names the girl I was until about the third grade. I hold compassion for her. 4. I’m not especially interested...

Autumnal

September 30, 2026

So here we go again with the fundamentally unjust Octoberness of August with the trees going so schizoid so early & commencing, thus, to really fuck with my need for more time to think whippoorwill & loon & even write that rhythm down like sound can murder death when really what this is is the 21st century & what we need is a...

Might the Student Know More? [37]

September 30, 2026

Funny, not enough research on the present moment yet, all of us are experts. The construction worker holding the dialectical slow/stop sign backwards yelled at me for moving forward, for my safety. Or maybe his? He just wanted me to be yelled at, not die! (Getting fired is expensive.) We had nothing else in common. A dumbass teacher only teaches his students to...

Juice Box

September 30, 2026

She didn’t want a Diet Coke, or any of the other beverages that the kids had. There was a machine near the bathrooms, plus juice boxes that her aunt had brought. Her brother drank apple juice all the time and she drank only tap water. Bottled water wasn’t really a thing yet, in this time...

Shoal

September 30, 2026

Then for a moment the light was the same—light of one particular hour of girlhood, one morning findable twice. Shoal, perhaps related to the Old English for skeleton: a sandbar that breaks the surface of water, causes a depth to ease. The ocean floor rises in a place singular, thinned, and we are permitted to see. When I learned the beautiful poet had died, I thought now she’ll never drink tea again. Which seemed the worst thing, though of course it wasn’t. I think I was trying to...

love of my life

September 30, 2026

maybe the second book isn’t about the tree rot formed into the virgin Mary shape people in town prayed to butthat it’s gone & though it feels recent isn’t they uprooted it so long ago there is grass where it was already yellowing in miserable summer but that’s okay it can still be about what my poems are always about one thing taking the...

The Magic of Butterflies

September 30, 2026

Thanks to sleight of proboscis and abracadabra via ommatidia, I’m seeing a Monarch, re- appearing out of thin air, eating sweet ooze, daring me to fathom the chutzpah of insects levitating prismatic from aster to hollyhocks to phlox and fluttering so incredibly close to flawless it’d be weird not to worship them daily until our respective deaths. If there’s anything bigger...

We Tell Ourselves Duck Stories in Order to Live

September 30, 2026

IN MY MIND, THE STORY is about the duck, but from the very start the duck has already been beheaded. I assume there was a whole duck before that, body-and-head, his face alive, maybe even smiling like the duck in João Gilberto’s song. But that image was never relayed to me. Of that, I am...

Changeling

September 30, 2026

On any given day, Miranda hears the children before she sees them. The sounds they make as they hang their backpacks from hooks, as they huff and hustle and huddle into clusters, sometimes squealing, sometimes spraying secrets into one another’s ears. But she always waits until final bell to open the door. Even if she...