Colin Herd

‘I wear my fear around me / I fan it out on my pillow’

Peter Gizzi

‘I did not understand / the code that held / me to the world.’

Jenny George

‘This had happened once before, / when my life first split / into comfort and pain.’

Miriam Bird Greenberg

‘Why wasn’t I better made / to refute assimilation’s maze’

Will Harris

‘I must / have been the only one to catch his eye, to hold it.’

Issue 141

Benoit Jutras

‘Our nation is a spell of nerves and gas. We say yes to monsters, to elegies etched in our palms.’ Translated by Daniel Canty.

Kim Fu

‘I see them as a needlepoint sampler, / flowing script that reads: everyone suffers.’

Benoit Jutras

Kim Kyung Ju

‘Underneath the leaves that stack my upper lip / the reindeer do not share their love.’ Translated from the Korean by Jake Levine.

Luiza Flynn-Goodlett

‘Syllables are excised by / X-Acto, fed into a shredder / for good measure.’

Renee Gladman

‘Things were starting to line up: history was speaking, which hardly ever happened to me.’

J.V. Foix

‘all in black, her arms raised in the air, their shadow sketching some malign bird I couldn’t recognize’

Leontia Flynn

‘a look I’d managed to accessorize / with raw dermatological distress.’

Issue 135

Leontia Flynn

‘The opposite of simply sitting about / in your head, like an egg in eggshell.’