Issue vii illustrated by Lori Evelyn
Your best friend calls you up to tell you he saw your boyfriend on the Internet doing some “sex stuff.”
Baby’s kissing bruises into her boyfriend’s neck, branding him black-and-blue.
I’m pretty sure that ISIS is to blame for the death of my grandmother.
The movie you both went to see isn’t important. How this date leads to the car, to the windows fogging is what matters.
Her placenta, a jackfruit dangles beneath— and patriarchs return beloved amongst the trees.
Issue vi illustrated by Kara Sajeske
Mom said our bodies were for God’s eyes only. Once, when Bobby Kafka tried to look down my pants in our back yard, I told him so.
When they grimace, she thinks they’re smiling. She smiles back, or does the closest thing she can to smiling.
Like anything—the finch, the tortoise, the coreopsis—we pass on, and so then, what else but for today?
On a queen-sized bed, an Oshun-picturesque seductress, who should have been Billie Holiday’s twin, said hello in that way good gin gets you.
I’ve never been much / for reading / in the dark
A strip of me, between my belly and throat, began to cry out. But I silenced it.
The first writer I ever slept with stole my watch off the nightstand.
There’s not even a pen, and we all claim to be writers.
Issue v illustrated by Casey Hannan
You never saw it, but there was a rabbit on the ceiling.
Before my wings melted, they were golden.
My dying mother never did let the priest come.
As your editor, I don’t like your book, but I do want to know how it ends.
Issue blk illustrated by Thandiwe Tshabalala
When they ask of their father, you will tell them he loved jazz.
Get up boy, goddamn. Get up just one more time.
Allow me to taste something pure and holy, have it pound on my body.
Death, to whom you lost this bet, came calling in spit-shined shoes.
In your case and mine, our poetry and the way we live are entwined.
This poem is to George Zimmerman, Darren Wilson, NYPD, and KKK–
The thing with afro hair is, sometimes, it grows upwards. My father had never seen this. He fell in love.
I woke up one morning wondering when the last time I’d spoken to me was.
Issue iii illustrated by Jennika Bastian
You remember the ancient Egyptians lined their eyes with kohl, watching their cats watch them. They could not see the Romans coming.
Isn’t there a song that goes “mix me up with water, it quiets down my edges?” Well, anyway, there should be.
Not old enough to vote, but old enough to drive, to ride the ferry to the city alone, to bear between us the heartbeat of life, brief, astonishing, with all its oh shit and what’ll we do and what if.
Don’t act brave when they come. Don’t open your door. Change your name. Run.
A stranger, as strangers are apt to do, approached.
Issue ii illustrated by Kara Sajeske
Before, I was assistant manager of a discount shoe outlet. At least now I am the boss of something. Our mother named us after presidents.
I’m on my knees while Olive plaits my curls, a dozen candles flirting with the air in this small bedroom.
Cocaine, marijuana, hashish, heroin, pills and alcohol. I don’t recall seeing most of these substances, but in stories my parents have shared with me, I’ve come to imagine them as omni-present.
I’m complicit, I know. It’s our affair, our thin promise to do and not do this again.
Prizefighting wasn’t about black and it wasn’t about blue; it was about how you lived the hues between.
My only instruction was: “Do what you are told.” In other words, I did what no one else wanted to do.
The inaugural illustrated by Tiffany Lam
Kyon natters softly. His mouthful of little songs wakes Cho because it’s the sound of her son.
He stood and looked suddenly like a little old man, his missing tooth like a keyhole in a door.
It is true I wanted to be pretty before intelligent.
There were two ways to make money in my hometown.
Boys will be boys. They stand like full stops instead of commas.
Handful of courage, small cup of coffee: this is how we survive.