Detective Varela calls it an interview room, but it looks an awful lot like the interrogation rooms in Law and Order. Over-airconditioned, scuffed floors, grubby walls, one-way mirror, rickety chair to keep you on edge. Paper coffee cups litter the tabletop. Goosebumps popping on your arms and legs, rubbing against your soft . . .
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I used to have a house full of sisters and a dress that smelled like oranges. I used to have a braid—from Caroline Harper New’s “Loom,” Volume 66, Issue 2 (Summer 2025) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.I wrote my first poem in 5th grade about a purple polka-dot . . .
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For several years in her twenties, Ruth lived with a man who did not believe in happiness. When she thought of Edwin later, she remembered him in motion: pacing the uneven floors of their studio apartment, slamming cabinet doors, frying eggs, spattering oil. Always espousing various theories of living, his red hair . . .
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The bubbles of my words amuse him.He pokes them with a forward tentacleas they rise from my mouth. Biggerbubbles for longer words. I can feeland see rather than hear his giggling.See: yes. A tittering of the body,a gelatinous shake which assures mehe still likes me.—from Benjamin S. Grossberg’s “My Octopus Lover Is Easy . . .
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You must be very tallto love the dark. You needsturdy legs and a heartthat struggles just enoughto bring your blood about themand raise it again to your head.You must feel in your chestthe finite days of its function.—from Dan Rosenberg’s “To Love the Dark,” Volume 66, Issue 2 (Summer 2025) Tell us . . .
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I could not bless. I could not bleed.My body was hers from first tolast. To not say bruise or burntand when the neighbor lay medown and unbuttoned me one by one, I did not pray. I did not ask or say.—from Jessica Cuello’s “My Mother’s Daughter,” Volume 65, Issue 3 (Fall 2024) . . .
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Are they pigeons? Fifth floor, other side ofthis giant window I know by heart theircomings/goings, their stayings-put on the still—from “The Pigeons,” Volume 66, Issue 2 (Summer 2025) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote. I wouldn’t call them poems really but as I walked home from St. Eugene’s School . . .
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“That stigma isolated me from the many other gay men who share my experience. What a loss for all of us to be separated by our silence. Over the past four years, my new friend from the dating app helped me to speak in public about my rape, and I realized there . . .
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It is cold, our voices carry like storksand the bonfire clashes with the stars.—from “Elegy at an Imminent End,” Volume 66, Issue 1 (Spring 2025) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.I think my writing moved from random notebook rants to something more formal during my senior year of . . .
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“There is a time machine in Princeton, New Jersey. I’ve been a patron from time to time. By all accounts, it’s been there since 1865. However, I wouldn’t discover it for some 154 years. To find it, one must make their way to the Princeton Junction railway station, accessible directly via New . . .
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