Category: The Last Word

New Poetry by David M. Alper: “Press 3 to Listen Again”

You have one new message. It came in at sunsetwhen the sky was a smeared fruit color. Hello. Here I am—your first language,the one you planted in the school playground,the rusty swing set, the dusk train stop. I remember your lips sometimes.When they were learning, they forgot me.How teeth molded me like freshly baked bread…
Three Original Poems by Choiselle Joseph

Hummingbird, or, First Blood at Witching Hour The night I first retched hummingbirdfeathers my mother said it was normal. Two a.m., both hands tremble-clingingto porcelain, the beak lodgedin my abdomen. Propeller wingsbuzzed against lining, bowlfilling with bile. She stroked my back, okra-slimylike a newborn’s cheek. Peachand lime-green clods of plumagelaunched from my throat. You get…
New Essay: “The Gospel of the Dumpster” by Joey Colby Bernert

Move-out day, April 2022. I had just graduated, just came out, and was sitting on everything the university left behind. The Photo This was me in April of 2022. A queer who had come to terms with their gender identity and sexuality. I had just finished my undergraduate degree in Women and Gender Studies. I was…
New Poetry by Delaney S. Saul: “You’ve Never Even Heard of Main Character Syndrome”

It’s the first Father’s Day since my dad died and I’m working at the mall. It’s been ten years since my psychotic break. I’m still recovering, even after all this time. Something I’ll always remember is how he came from out of town to drive me to the hospital. I could never tell him how…
New Poetry: “Inventory” by Em Townsend

The law of conservation states that energy in an isolated system will remain constant over time It is day 2 of post-graduate reality: alreadyyou are lonely Your hair is choppy around your forehead from where you trimmed it yourself in a moment of desperation, wanting to feel like you had control over something, wanting to…
New Poetry: “Work and Punishment” by Sara Cosgrove

When I returned homefrom the interview(the one that made sense),I brought a bouquet. I brought hope and a funny story.I brought the beginning. Months later,when I returned home from work,I brought details …about my colleagues’ behavior,about following me into the restroom,about giving me strange tasks,about their token-friends-with-disabilities stories.Except their friends were smarter, sicker, and thinner…
Joe Milazzo: Four Poems from Plain Language

Plain Language The path by which you entered is barred to you. Grazed by a low eye, scarps of oak bark lump in a lunar mantle. My frailty catches a dagger in the engineering of any leaf. My deficit narrative is an egg-hauling ant. Oleo has its boons but, meanwhile, few of them are molten.…
New Translations by Kit Schluter: Three Poems by bruno darío

Great Expectations To encompass is to stroke the void, that subtle material.The heart fits into the physics of thingswhen we celebrate continuity between dimensions. Invasive imagery stalks my narration. Perception is an ally, and it lends structure;let’s try to unwrap experience and bring it sensitively out of focus,rendering it unclassifiable. Keep me company.You imagined it…
New Poetry: “To Infinity and Beyond” by Joel Anthony Harris

I have a running sore on my chest, a pockmarked full moon that waxes radiant in inconsolable bereavement. I bear it as a nursery swaddled in shade cloth to ditch the sun. It is my silent wound. My silent night. A silence etched into my being as a sinkhole without the finality of rocks or…