Caroline Barnes
A Story

Caroline Barnes - A Story

Poetry
Caroline Barnes is a writer and editor in Silver Spring, Maryland. She is especially interested in reading and writing poems that explore the ways humans and animals intersect. Caroline has published… Read more »
Noreen Ocampo
Another Poem About Cut Fruit

Noreen Ocampo - Another Poem About Cut Fruit

Poetry
Noreen Ocampo is a Filipino American writer and poet from metro Atlanta. She is the author of the chapbooks Not Flowers (Variant Literature, 2022) and There Are No Filipinos in Mississippi (Porkbelly… Read more »
Nina Colette Peláez
Aureole

Nina Colette Peláez - Aureole

Poetry
Nina Colette Peláez is a poet, artist, educator, and cultural producer based in Maui, Hawaii. An adoptee born in Las Vegas and raised in Brooklyn, she holds an MFA from Bennington College and is… Read more »
Genevieve Payne
In Amsterdam

Genevieve Payne - In Amsterdam

Poetry
Genevieve Payne received her MFA from Syracuse University where she was awarded the Leonard Brown Prize in poetry. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The End, Bennington Review,… Read more »
Kaecey McCormick
Two Weeks after My Daughter Arrives Home from a Residential Treatment Center for Girls

Kaecey McCormick - Two Weeks after My Daughter Arrives Home from a Residential Treatment Center for Girls

Poetry
Originally from New England and after two decades in Maryland, Kaecey McCormick now writes poetry and fiction in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the winner of the 2023 Connecticut Poetry Prize,… Read more »

Aureole

Nina Colette Peláez

“The photograph of the missing being . . . will touch me like the delayed rays of a star” —Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida There is no body, no way for me to know her face, gazing vacant from the casket where some stranger placed her carefully. Their arms heavy with her, touching her, they held her like a child, held her in a way I never will. I am trying to recall a memory that isn’t mine. Now, she is ash and I’m the aftermath: a sorrow she swaddled in the clutch of her skinny arms for just a moment, then passed along. In the only photograph I have of her, she is eighteen, pregnant with me. Halo of blonde hair teased around her head, gray cat lifted in her clumsy grasp. She doesn’t know that she will die. She is still smiling, eyes wide, mouth faded at the crease, this border I have failed to breach.
Read more »