I’m Liz and I’m a box of emergency contraception.
“It was this or Netflix”: Speed-Dating on Valentine’s Day
“They would never have something like this in Iceland.” We’re in the taxi on the way to the bar, and my friend Sandra, who is from Iceland and has less than enthusiastically agreed to accompany […]
Look, Don’t Touch
If you find that you are the type of person who is constantly at war with these two alternating states of self—where obligations can be ditched at a moment’s notice, or begrudgingly followed through—then you will feel right at home in the world of “Imaginary Museums” by Nicolette Polek.
Poetry by Aubri McCarter
My mother wanted things.
Impotence
The aging bad boy of French letters’ latest outing exhausts nearly half its word count rehashing tired material. Then, when an antidepressant finally renders his narrator impotent, it picks up.
Chloe the Bodega Hunter
I’m a lifetime fan of cheap eats and cheap tastes. I consider myself a connoisseur of the cheapest New York bites. After moving to New York City, and coming from my much more budget-friendly hometown […]
Model Literary Citizenship Survey: Bridgett M. Davis
What does it mean to be a good literary citizen? If you’re like me, you have a complicated relationship to the word “citizen.” As a citizen of the United States and a feminist living in […]
Poetry by Sébastien Bachand
The wind pulls a crystal from my eye
Celebrity Boyfriend
equal parts depressing and delicious My boyfriend has a girlfriend. I am devastated. To be fair, he doesn’t know me, despite that, undoubtedly, our souls have known each other for lifetimes. Also he is a […]
Contents of Dead People’s Pockets
The section for cash held a Trojan condom, but when his wife came to claim the contents of her dead husband’s pants, she said he’d had a vasectomy.
Send in the Clowns
Last month, I went to a reading where there was a clown. MX gallery right off Canal Street in Chinatown, up five grueling flights of stairs. I stumbled into the dimly lit art space out […]
Two Poems by Daniela Ochoa
radical tenderness.
Letters to Four Men Who I Have Never Actually Met But Do Feel an Inexplicable and Troubling Tenderness Towards
I don’t eat meat but if I did I’d buy it from you. When you smiled at me on my first day in the neighborhood I did not smile back and I feel bad about […]
The Future of Lebanon
After days of zealous protesters surging through Lebanon’s capital, nationwide, and worldwide, calling for political and economic reform in the country, Prime Minister Saad Hariri has officially stepped down. The Lebanese people were initially triggered […]
things we don’t talk about
Content warning: suicide, mental health, institutionalization last may, i emptied thirty (30) little heart-slowing pills called propanolol into my palm, dropped them onto my tongue, took a sip of water, and swallowed. […]
How to Talk Nice
Before you go to school for the first time, you learn how to talk nice.
“To see something last, it’s like death escaped”
Grafton Tanner conjures the ghosts in our devices and invites us to join their chatroom. You’ll leave haunted.
Poetry by Amyiah Hillian
The strongest brown body that I know shrinks in public
The Man-Children
What is striking about Lerner’s third novel is the way it implicates itself, its forms—literature, prose, poetry—in the collapse of public discourse, and the proliferation of “man-children.”
Date Night with Vomitina
Dave was a pathological flake, and after three years of dating, I still wasn’t used to his absolute surprise, confusion, and disappointment.