miCRo: “No Horses” by Erin Slaughter
The first line in Erin Slaughter’s poem “No Horses” is an answer to an unasked question: “Because giving pleasure is less vulnerable / than receiving.” In a tangle of image and interruption, the poem circles an unspoken force.
miCRo: “Compensation” by Ken Poyner
In “Compensation,” Ken Poyner shows us how improbable relationships can become possible once we accept that complexity can be as beautiful as harmony.
miCRo: “The Therapist Asks, How Does the Brain Feel” by Prince Bush
“The Therapist Asks, How Does the Brain Feel” is an evolving answer, a rickety list, a masterclass in the semicolon.
miCRo: Two microfictions by Matt Greene
Matt Greene’s microfictions take up the generation-defining question: how do we make sense of our place within an eroding world?
miCRo: Two pieces by Barbara Black
From their first sentences to their last, “Needlework” and “Gotunabe” pull the reader in with their odd, satisfying images. Drink these wonderful pieces up.
miCRo: “Retail Therapy” by Molly Bess Rector
In Molly Bess Rector’s poem “Retail Therapy,” lonely girls go shopping. Across reflecting couplets, the surface of a lake in summer morphs into a department store window. Behind the window grows a garden of what was and what could be: “Oh, to dress / beyond ourselves.”
miCRo: “Kim” by Koss
This piece is invested in collapsing time, in freeze-framing and rewinding inexplicable violence.
miCRO: “Eid al-Adha” by Latifa Ayad
In less than 500 words, Ayad’s sweeping essay takes us from the speaker’s mother’s baklava to the rams sacrificed on the family’s farm to the “grapey surface” of a “dissected sheep’s eye.”
miCRo: Two pieces by Ji Yun (1724-1805)
In these translations, readers must counter assumptions about who provides narrative resolution and begin new understandings of old symbols as meaning accumulates and distills through the language.
miCRo: “Well Done, Middle School Administrators” by Julie Jones
This wicked sharp dreamscape begins with our tween-boy narrator and his father being chased through a middle school by a bear.
miCRo: “Before the Fiat” by Sophia Stid
This poem meditates on—and elevates—the word No in ways I haven’t seen before. I think, of course, of the issue of consent in intimate relationships, and the power that No needs to have in that context
miCRo: “Drug Dealer: A ’90s Whip Reel” by Kristin Robertson
From cars to cocktail napkins to Hennessy bottles, these snapshots create a coming-of-age story rich with heart and heartbreak.
