all aboard: issue #2.

There is a music that moves us through the summer months. You can feel it in your bones, as you pound foot to pavement. We, your editors, are children of the sun, and so we couldn’t help ourselves. While you’ve been gone, we ran around and swayed under the suns of foreign countries (like Queens) and...

encounters: Chris Abani

When I read Chris Abani’s new book of poetry, Sanctificum, on a train, It was all I could do to stay in my seat, my inside on fire. As a person who navigates multiple cultures, the female body, and spirituality in an often brutal world, this book spoke directly to my obsessions. As the Library Journal...

poems: Bushra Rehman

Masjid Alfalah The minar and dome of our masjid took longer to grow than trees. Our fathers bought the land, then tilled it. Before that, it was a parking lot for the Jehovah’s Witness. They sold it when the door to door wasn’t bringing in the donations. Our fathers sowed the seeds then Qurans and...

poems: R. Dwayne Betts

Metropolis A woman tattoos Rashid’s name above her breast & talks about the conspiracy to destroy blacks. As if this cancer of handcuffs equals people leaving their homes holding red carnations, & not Timbs scuffed & leaning from night’s grinding. A life sentence begins with...

the playlist: Danse Danse Macabre!

Track 1: If Birds Gather You Hair For Nesting by Anna Journey The title of Anna Journey’s debut poetry collection comes from an Appalachian folk myth: if birds gather your hair for nesting, you’ll go crazy. The beauty and threat of that statement runs throughout Journey’s work. In “Adorable Siren,...

photo essay: Rolando Pellot

LA GALLERA What you need to be aware of before you go to a Nicaraguan cockfight is that the two roosters placed in front of each other in the center of the ring will fight until one of them can no longer stand. Spectators will be calling for blood and cheer when they inevitably see it. It’s surprising...

poem: Karen Finneyfrock

Oceanography There are seven layers to the ocean. The top one is clear, cellophane or wax paper, moves like oil with no respect for irony. The second layer is ocean wax, which liquefies as it gets cold instead of hot, so ocean wax is thinnest near the ice caps. Layer three is made up of animals. Squid...

the conversation: Jon Sands talks with Jack McCarthy

Stephyn Dobyns refers to Jack McCarthy as “one of the wonders of contemporary poetry.” Anyone who has had the opportunity to be hypnotized by one of Jack’s poetic spells knows what Mr. Dobyns is referring to.  I first saw him read in 2008 at Bar 13 in Manhattan, and was absolutely dumb struck.  It...

poems: Bianca Spriggs

OMEN And then there was the time we found a sorry gray cat that had been hit outside ______’s house right down the street from the cafe. The animal was so pitiful, our bleeding hearts couldn’t stand to leave it, so we found many newspapers, our hands never once touching any parasites, to maneuver it off...

narratives: Melissa Febos

“Jessie” I wasn’t the sort of kid who told the other children where babies came from.  Those messengers were most often the kind of pale, sneering boys who loitered in the back of the second grade classroom with a crusty ring of snot dried around their nostrils.  These were the boys who...

poem: Elana Bell

Charter for the over-sung country Live in me like blood, like my name, like the numbers tattooed on my grandmother’s arm, like my mother’s milk and her slow disease. I’ve tried to run away; You are not a place. I’ve built a house of bricks to keep out heavy weather. The house falls down, your smell...

poems: Saeed Jones

Room 31 Cigarette smoke is the smell of the last couple here, the ghost of their stains still on the sheets, and the bed aches with the weight of my waiting. I’ve left the door ajar, enough for night to push its tongue into the room. (Are you on your way? Where did you tell your wife you were...

poems: Aricka Foreman

hindsight the potted lily was a horrible gift but you should have seen your face, excited you had found a keepsake, something to root my name, keep the delicate coo when we made love, living. it was easy in the beginning, to coddle each bud, swell with each drop that found its way to the top through the...

poems: Ocean Vuong

Tenement (nocturne) Before a darkening window, two figures merge into one. The room begins to tremble. Shadows shake loose their masters. Twilight arrives in sheets of silk melting onto wet skin. In the next apartment, the landlord, his trousers tangled at the ankles, presses an ear to the wall, listening...