Our Titles
The Smallest Thing on Earth,
Talin Tahajian
the smallest thing on earth asks wild divine questions about the universe and our place in it, but from the grimy city beach, the bathroom floor, the club basement. By piecing together flashes of what people do in secret, we witness an intimate exploration of the confusing state of urbanity when there's so much humanity flowing through it. The city becomes its own sort of animal.
on this planet
there are people. We make it rain in glass boxes, then step insideall naked & covered in dirt. We're full of blood, which is really just another
kind of water. We burn things & inhale them. There are no foxes
except on Earth. Usually, it is bright here. When it's cold, pieces of ice
fall from the sky. These days are not bright at all. We drink the milk
of other wild animals. We kill things with skin. We feed our children.
Sometimes, we make mistakes & we are sorry. We crush things
with our teeth. We kiss each other & fall asleep. This is the warmest
space. We sleep together. We dream far from home. At night, we're harmless.
Two Tales,
Lo Kwa Mei-en
Two Tales moves between broken sonnets and prose poems that recast lines from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Nightingale" into a contemporary story of gender, servitude, power, and objecthood, and navigate life, the afterlife, and the rules that structure the past.
Said the emperor, "The whole world knows what I possess better than I do myself."
It was wrong of me to diss the stiffly evolving corn.It longs to be mediocre, as do the years I did not live.
I have never felt so American as the time I mated
a poem I imagined would terrorize my sexualization
to a poem I tore up after the sex act of immigration
and stayed awake that you, haute poet, might see me
period. I have lived sans full-length mirror since 2009
as a call-out with a hole. Bile fills it, flapping prettily,
a feeling that flips me off—oh-ho, what a pretty bird.
It was what of me to serve up drama like a salty verb,
like haute semen, like a vigil buttressing a pantoum?
A tiny gold key is overstimulating the rented grove.
Rewind the formula—a rental god, quiche, and title
divide two girly criminals on a brilliant fabergé pyre.