Telemachus is not the only fatherless boy in Ithaca. When Odysseus left to go to war, he took the men of Ithaca with him, and now their sons are old enough to eye his palace and his wife. Telemachus does not want one of his...
Remember running from the top of the hill telling stories about skeletons in the forest, Years later you buried yours there and I never knew All I had was a pencil sharpener shaped like a house and a spelling bee trophy that didn’t belong to me What did I do to...
Rose Macaulay’s poem “The Shadow” explores the experience of civilian uncertainty, trauma, and helplessness during World War I aerial bombings, focalizing the interiority of civilians. Impressionist techniques of onomatopoeia and sparse diction elucidate trauma’s impact on civilians, marking their distress as inarticulable. The anticipatory dread of...
Diasporic identity is scarcely singular, yet Gianna Patriarca’s poetry collection Italian Women and Other Tragedies and Souvankham Thammavongsa’s short story collection How to Pronounce Knife share particularly striking similarities in their portrayals of diasporic mothers and daughters. The domestic space of home shapes the shared...
The release of Beyoncé Knowles’s sixth studio album, Lemonade, signified a turning point in the conception of Black female identity within popular music. Described as a “shot heard around the world” by scholar Zeffie Gaines, the multimedia experience of Lemonade serves as an ode to...
It's not so much the full bottles As it is the empty glass. A broken promise Stale and sticky on the crooked coffee table. I’ll never drink whiskey again. It’s not so much the noxious assault in the doorway As it is the broken flag on the mailbox. Even when empty, I pushed...
If I’ve learned anything, it’s that Sunday night might always be heavy. It might always remind us of every night we spent convincing everyone else they were worthy of healing, every instance bringing rise to the nights that we didn’t want to live. Maybe all...
I found a letter in my mailbox addressed to someone who doesn’t live here anymore. The same mailbox where someone left used cotton balls, rubber bands, and needles inside. The mailbox that I removed from a crumbling brick wall to sanitize with a bottle of...
The bartender starts work now. He doesn’t drive. He walks. I guide: a vanilla glow peeking at winter’s chalk drawings. He goes in through the front door. I go in through the window. The bartender’s lips are dry. He fills craters with liquid. Warm in the stomach. Water on the moon. Drops sift through space, down our cheeks, like...