We are stretching towards each other,
words tangling. The words can’t always
be torn apart. Sometimes you
are ти. Sometimes we touch.
Jane loved her and often thought of her skin.
Its misleading surface area always moved her, how it wrapped around
and became infinite.
I saw a barn owl staring out from a telephone wire
driving down the road with the sky looking
like the edges of the newspaper we crumpled
into balls to light the woodstove
By MARIA JOSEP ESCRIVÀ
Translated by PETER BUSH
Who
Who has ever felt the shock of a brook
being sucked dry by the warm earth?
Who has ever felt the shock of the last
house falling apart in the mountains, mineral
corpse, stone by stone, bone by bone
of each man banished?
Winner of the DISQUIET Prize for Poetry
By IQRA KHAN
Watch the poet read from this piece at our Issue 28 launch party:
I begin as revelation. As explosion of glottal light against silence.
I am again asking for directions to the Haram, my ankles fluent in Arabic.
I am again asking for direction, ya Haram, my ankles flowing with Arabic!
Hagar, watch how God transforms this wilderness to civilization.
By ZACK STRAIT
There were other vehicles moving through the darkness behind us. But we didn’t notice. We forced our bodies into the brambles. We stood on our tiptoes, reached high above our heads like we were greedy for the stars that night. But we craved something attainable, we thought. We thought our need was for the wild summer blackberries. But we were foraging for another memory to sustain us through the evil days to come. And as we ate, the past ripened in clusters for us there among the thorns. I don’t know what my father thought about then, as we filled our bellies with those dark jewels, but I could almost taste my grandmother’s fruit cobbler. The blackberries, I remember, were perfect that night. They were plump and sweet. The juice didn’t stain our fingers or mouths. We ate and ate. How wonderful, how the earth offers such goodness to us without cost. And how awful.
By BOB HICOK
Caroline resembled moonlight.
She never appeared when it rained,
made the grass and broken windows
more beautiful, and had me wondering
if our love was waxing or waning.
Human systems exist in the mystery
always at the point of spilling
over green, over and over their present containers
of cities and grids and human perception
for what of entanglements, what of catastrophes
what of black holes, of soot from burnt timber
what of seashells, snails, urchins in the pavement
of ancient Greek settlements
Still bleeding from birth
I looked up from you, daughter
your grandma was
shouting at me
in our hospital room
and I thought, enough
of this childhood pain
(an emancipation never
complete in my heart)
the next weeks your little fist
dimpling my breast was a
mere aesthetic
as she had not blessed me
I could not let her go
For the cherries from
Saturday’s market I used
a sharp coffee spoon
each bright heart-organ
hoards the clit of the fruit
I stabbed and extracted
hurting my thumb
sometimes I couldn’t get
all the meat off
you fetched a stool
each fruit, gravely chosen
now came lifted and pillowed
on your soft palm
then you drank all the juice
in the discard bowl
it ran down your chin
and onto the floor
I drained all the juices
from under the flesh and
you guzzled that too
Such gusto my dear
with each breath I bless you
go go go
Farah Peterson‘s work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Atlantic, The Best American Magazine Writing, The Florida Review, Ploughshares, and The Threepenny Review, and is forthcoming in the 2025 Pushcart Prize anthology. She is a law professor at the University of Chicago.
Watch the poet read from this piece at our Issue 28 launch party:
“Happy and furry?” she inquires,
of the TV—
but I’ve tuned out. Uh-oh, this may be
tough to unriddle. When you’re eighty-three,
as she is, with creeping dementia—all
sorts of imponderables float by,
and everything the more inscrutable
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Celebrating 15 Years