Abstract: This essay explores the history of sound recordings of human voices and the impact of these "dead voices" in our everyday lives through the lens of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the song "Dreams" by The Cranberries, and a mother's relationship with her teenage son.
Abstract: In "tending my brother's grave," the poet speaks about visiting her brother's grave, how she honors his memory, and how she anticipates being buried beside him. In "they run in my veins," the poet speaks about the desire to be in the wilderness, running with the coyotes and wolves. The difficulty of being human is something she countered by identifying with her animal selves.
Abstract: These poems capture the sweetness of love, the fears of relationships gone wrong, and the curative power of jazz.
Abstract: A teenager's star-crossed first love and his friendship with a troubled youth pastor deepen his understanding of life and the afterlife.
Abstract: These poems examine desire, faith, and embodiment through queer intimacy, religious language, and encounters with art and the more-than-human world. Moving from a lover's mouth imagined through Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio's depiction of Judas and Christ, to a collective Catholic voice grappling with sexual repression and longing, the work considers how devotion and power shape intimacy. A museum walk turns toward frustration with God as the speaker confronts hunger, love, and the body through acts of looking. The sequence closes with an ecological eroticism in which a wasp's failed mating ritual unsettles human assumptions about sex, agency, and belonging. Across these poems, sacred imagery and desire meet in moments of tenderness, doubt, and transformation.
Abstract: After Mia, a dolphin keeper at Seaside Aquarium, is attacked during a performance, she plots to release bottlenose dolphin Sasha into the wild and save her from euthanasia. As she reckons with a broken engagement, "Keepers" explores freedom, captivity, the enclosures imposed upon us—and those we impose on ourselves.
Abstract: An essay that explores the difficulty (and futility) of rating pain levels.
Abstract: This essay explores the cultural heritage of soba-making traditions and modern environmental cultivation through the story of a farm-to-table shop in Kyoto, Japan. The author examines how the preservation of Japanese soba is a nostalgic experience that transcends geographic boundaries.
Abstract: This poem portrays a mother's life in fragmented, intimate moments of humanity, exploring cycles of shadow and growth through the lens of Greek mythology.
Abstract: A saddlemaker in Southern Colorado grieves the death of his brother and tries to make sense of his complicated feelings for his brother's widow while he works on a special project for a young rider who has recently lost her leg.
Abstract: "The poem "Wesside Haibun" explores legacies of plantation labor in the Hawaiian Islands, and asks who will bear the brunt of these histories and structures of exploitation in generations to come."
Abstract: A brother reflects on his sister's death through a late-night encounter with grief, shame, and the undertakers' impersonal efficiency. As images of televised intimacy contrast with the cold handling of the body, the speaker confronts guilt, propriety, and the uneasy boundary between life and death. From postwar Korea to immigrant life in America, the poem traces a journey from hunger to hope. Through memories of "pig-bowl soup" and powdered milk, the speaker reflects on survival, longing, and the enduring belief that work, family, or even movies might offer renewal amid uncertainty.
Abstract: Beset by winter weather, a dying deer, and a shared history of loss and illness, "The Good Thing" follows a father and daughter as they take a walk through the woods in rural Vermont.
Abstract: A daughter in a slowly crumbling family in 1980s Kansas City receives a pet bunny for Easter. As the parents plunge toward divorce, the bunny becomes a horrifying repository for the feelings of the entire family.
Abstract: "The Making of the Imperial Tofu" is a short story about a group of Chinese children receiving mandatory training at a military camp, where a tragedy unleashes unexpected consequences.
Abstract: "Behind Closed Doors" looks at how childhood traumas and attachment styles shape our sense of privacy and intimacy in adulthood. "Everywhere, Light" rewrites the myth of Icarus through loss and yearning. The poem balances upward gazes with downward falls, holding itself in a space perpetually midair. "My Heart Didn't Bleed for the Grief of the World" reflects on universal and individual suffering, questioning the meaning of seeing and sharing, and the limits that define humanness.
Abstract: How to Drive Drunk in a Flaming Paddock: A poem about drunk driving, youth and recklessness in rural New Zealand. How to Desecrate a Holy Message: A poem about youthful intimacy and religious heritage in a small town. This Is the End (& Other Declarations): A poem about the unnameability of absence.
Abstract: The speaker contemplates an invasive plant called Devil's Beggarticks, which has populated the banks of a suburban creek, and her own implication in the environmental changes made apparent by the plant. An ars poetica leaning into fall and winter imagery as well as text elements, such as punctuation, the poem explores the speaker's writing process during a loved one's cancer treatments. At the fall equinox, hiking in mountain ecosystems, the writer contemplates seasonal changes (and what doesn't change with seasons), while confronting recent griefs and mortality itself.
