First Proof
A coming-of-age story about girlhood in the suburbs during the 1990s.
A coming-of-age story about girlhood in the suburbs during the 1990s.
An excerpt from their memoir about being one of nineteen children, raised by a Hindu Hare Kṛṣṇa mother and Muslim father, growing up queer and Black in Cleveland, Ohio.
Experimental fiction responding to photographs that reinterpret representations of form in conversation with classical sculpture.
A preview of Brontez Purnell’s upcoming collection, 100 Boyfriends.
To create her compass poems, poet and programmer Allison Parrish trained a machine learning model with two parts: one spells words based on how they sound, and the other sounds out words based on how they’re spelled.
Like John Lennon and Jim Hendrix, Joanna Stingray has an FBI file. In 1984, the 24-year-old Angeleno accompanied her sister on a state-sanctioned tour to Leningrad and secretly met Boris Grebenshchikov, a star in the Soviet music underground.
If I were face-up in the MRI machine, I’d see the cherry blossoms affixed to the ceiling. / But I’m face-down. / My arms are extended above my head. / A crane, I read this morning, can stay aloft for up to ten hours. / It barely needs to flap its wings.
The night it occurred to him he was living inside a corpse…
All the experts say I’m sane.
Some even say I might acquire insight someday.
At thirteen, I felt my body slopping. Though I sat in the middle of the nurse’s height-weight chart, though I’d memorized the textbook diagram with its cake-like cross-section of flesh (epidermis, dermis, hypodermis stippled yellow with fat), my problem went deeper than biology.
Increasingly, poems reach me physically, testing my physical and emotional boundaries—looking for places they might get inside, frequencies at which I might hear, poking at sensuous dead zones.