In My Next Life Let Me Be a Tomato by Natasha Rao
“I want to be unabashed, audacious, to gobble / space, to blush deeper each day in the sun, knowing / I’ll end up in an eager mouth.”
Postcards to the Other Brown Girl in My Weightlifting Class by Tarfia Faizullah
"I do not want / to give myself—I want to be stem, / stamen, petal, not blossom, not bloom—"
apology by George Abraham
"forgive the bodies i swallowed like broken teeth: the knees i spent trying to summon god in my own mouth:"
Meditations in an Emergency by Cameron Awkward-Rich
"There’s a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair."
Black Lead in a Nancy Meyers Film by Rio Cortez
"Aging, at all. I want that. And to fall / perhaps most honestly in love / beside the ocean"
The Attic and Its Nails by Naomi Shihab Nye
"It’s hard up there. You dig in a box for whatever the moment requires: sweater, wreath, the other half of the walky-talky, and find twelve things you forgot about
What We Agreed to Call “Snow” in Yorùbá by I.S. Jones
"Snow is a landscape of loneliness. // It returns to Earth if only to be touched a little longer."
asmarani makes prayer by Safia Elhillo
"verily everything that is lost will be / given a name & will not come back / but will live forever"