If you ever want to feel real,
even important,
cry on the street.
Sob. Heave. Bum a half-smoked cigarette.
Drunks rally around your wet eyes:
A woman brings a paper cup of soft serve.
A man in a floral shirt puts his hand on your shoulder
to deliver queer advice:
“You’re just going through it, hun.
We’re all always going through it.”
Kevin Hautigan is from South Florida and lives in New York City. He graduated from Georgetown University.
MARIA DE CALDAS ANTÃO
Maria de Caldas Antão speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her poem “My Freedom,” which explores the idea of freedom, and what it might mean to be free: personally, politically, physically, philosophically.
NICOLE COOLEY
The incinerator smoke an incision in the sky. / My daughter no longer small yet still I want to swallow her back into my body. / Sky a scalding. / My daughter asks me to stop saying, I wish this wasn’t the world you have to live in. / In my dream my girl is the size of a thumb I catch between my teeth. / Sky all smoke.
WHAT WE'RE READING
As the summer wanes, our community recommends three pithy books that can help stretch out the season’s end.
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