miCRo: “Leftist Love Song” by Jay Julio
Jay Julio’s “Leftist Love Song” pokes and prods at all the ways our current political climate has disappointed us, and peels back the mask of the “American dream” to reveal the devastation that lies beneath it.
miCRo: “Ends Meet” by Leslie Parry
You make a run for it when the sky goes dark, waiting out the storm in the rental car, where at least you don’t have to whisper.
miCRo: “Tea and Seeds” by Yasmine Yu
In her first publication, Yasmine Yu shows us the physical yearning for one’s own lost cultural inheritance.
miCRo: “Hit the Tree” by Denise Bergman
Bergman’s writing is breathless, a strategic babbling attempt to catalog all of the details of a car accident.
miCRo: “Telling It” by Chiwenite Onyekwelu
“What small hand has / all my infant blood?” What begins as a meditation on the scars on the speaker’s back becomes a portrait of unfathomable pain in equally unfathomable grace.
miCRo: “Ghost words” by Vimla Sriram
Spirits are hardly passive in Vimla Sriram’s memory-driven “Ghost words.”
miCRo: “Had Penelope a kiln, she would outcast” by Purvi Shah
Purvi Shah transforms myth into a needle-sharp meditation on bodiless, action, history, and more.
miCRo: “Okay” by Scott Garson
Identities shift, and first impressions rule in Scott Garson’s “Okay.”
miCRo: “The Obsoletion” by Tanya Sangpun Thamkruphat
Tanya Sangpun Thamkruphat’s poem examines and resists cycles of so-called improvement.
miCRo: “Probability Statistics” by Dawn Miller
…in this waiting room purgatory, we begin to see how things are always more connected than we think.
miCRo: “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” by Matthew Tuckner
Tuckner explores the passage of time, and its painful collisions, in a couple’s deceptively ordinary afternoon.
miCRo: “After The Seine at Beaugival” by Vincent Frontero
In ten lines of simple, declarative verse, Vincent Frontero offers a dizzying meditation on transience, fragility, appearances, and resolve.