Guernica
Memory Fragments
ByAlina Tiphagne, guest edited byMeena KandasamyApril 15, 2025
Much like the beetle extracting water from invisibility, queer identity carefully collects itself into community.
Chicken
ByYasmin Adele MajeedApril 15, 2025
“A little girl is by the communal sinks, humming to herself as she washes her hands. Risham recognizes her as the referee from the game of chicken.”
The Grind
ByNina MartinezApril 15, 2025
“Say it with me!” he leans over in the dark, and grips the sides of his steering wheel like a neck. “They—deserve—to die!”
Midnight Service
ByEsther LinApril 15, 2025
Sixty voices seesawed in the song / of tongues. Sixty bodies gripped
Soda Byor, Boda Byor
ByOnaiza DrabuApril 15, 2025
‘You know as well as I do, this forest opens its passages to those who tell stories. Stories, after all, show the way, don’t they?’
The Glow
ByMaria KuznetsovaApril 15, 2025
“It doesn’t help that I have no address to guide us, only a pin of a nearby park and a picture of me and Baba standing outside the front door of her place when I was an awkward teenager, squinting into the sun.”
Black Girl in Wyoming-after Ross Gay
ByAfua AnsongApril 15, 2025
on her skin, tone, a mixture of sienna and copper / a bit shy of the rust in the dust of earth
Strong as a Mule, Thick as a Rope
BySoraya PalmerApril 15, 2025
“No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body.” –Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body.
A Citadel in Queens
ByEsther LinApril 15, 2025
By air, earth, fire, and blood in my veins, I / know something of the devil
From the Archives
In Costa Rica, My Father Speaks
Her voice / was jazz, like yours when you’re telling stories
Snapshot in the Kitchen for Minerva Margarita
Andrea Cote Botero Translated from Spanish byCraig Epplin
and boys / that barely cross the threshold / and become men
The Art of Vagueness: On Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
"I am everything they never was, never meant to be" - Little Simz, "Sideways"
Joli Petit Accent
“Growing up, moving between the United States and Palestine made me feel as if I shed one self and inhabited another, over and over again.”
Taximen
"Trinidad was brewing with a sense of premonition, that time was either running out or coming to a head."
Bathhouse Gossip
“They've swung in the opposite direction and they're all done with democracy and liberalism.”
Your Name
Andrea Cote Botero Translated from Spanish byCraig Epplin
I’ll leave a note in the weeds / I know nothing about the others
Animal
Andrea Cote Botero Translated from Spanish byCraig Epplin
But here, you know, I ride the train like straddling / the back of something, with others right behind
Call
BySamira Negrouche, translated from French byNathalie Handal
language springs from all languages / it is from absence that language is born.