Commentary

Will COVID-19 Strengthen our Bonds?

By Jennifer Stitt May 12, 2020

Living with chronic illness in the midst of a pandemic requires a new map.

Bodies & Nature Health

Essay

Becoming Animal

By Kimi Eisele May 6, 2020

All of us touching our faces, touching habitats, dislodging species.

Bodies & Nature Health

Essay

The Pandemic Novelist Has Regrets

By Thea Lim April 26, 2020

In books and movies we've imagined it would take a gruesome virus to push working people to the edge. In reality, late capitalism is enough.

Bodies & Nature Health

Essay

Ordinary Insanity

By Sarah Menkedick April 7, 2020

America’s fetishization of reproductive risk is driving mothers mad.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

Your Name Means Garden

Poetry by Innas Tsuroiya March 27, 2020

What does it mean to graduate / your way through the world?

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Essay

Medusa and the Invention of Spells

By Kathryn Nuernberger March 25, 2020

A spell is most effective when you want something and can remember a time it already existed.

Arts & Culture Bodies & Nature

Lives Photography

Faery Land

By Jeff Sharlet March 24, 2020

“Don’t take chances,” he said. “Given your history.” But chances, not history, are what we’re given.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

Hurricanes with the Names of My Friends

Poetry by Jonathan Aprea March 13, 2020

We are disappearing into / the map’s folds. Small birds. Smaller ones.

Arts & Culture Bodies & Nature

Fiction

Schrödinger’s Dog

An excerpt from the novel by Martin Dumont, translated from the French by John Cullen March 10, 2020

The doctor talked about the operation: “Major surgery, but the techniques are well understood.” He spelled out the risks: 80 percent success rate.

Bodies & Nature Health

Commentary

The Cover of My Face

By Meredith Talusan March 10, 2020

A trans author reflects on the fraught history of trans women’s memoir covers, and why she didn’t want her likeness on her own.

Bodies & Nature Gender Lit World

Essay

The Terrarium

By Brice Particelli March 5, 2020

The flat earth community has been on a fast, upward climb.

Bodies & Nature Politics

Interview

Darcey Steinke: How to Be in a Body

By Elizabeth Lothian March 3, 2020

The writer embraces menopause, matriarchy, and the language of the body.

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

[You button this coat as if one sleeve]

Poetry by Simon Perchik February 28, 2020

making room for the night sky / the dead try on

Bodies & Nature

Essay

Beasts of the Fields

By Aimée Baker February 19, 2020

Family heartache on the northern New York border, and the creatures that bore witness to it.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

Blank Notes

Poetry by Lee Young-ju, translated from the Korean by Jae Kim February 14, 2020

How about adopting a fully grown girl? Says a broken-headed doll.

Bodies & Nature Gender

Fiction

Thirteen

Fiction by Kim Yi-seol, translated from the Korean by Janet Hong January 30, 2020

The real reason every one of them backed away, scared shitless, was because of her hard, black nipples. Her nipples were more terrifying than the curses her mouth spewed or the fire in her eyes.

Bodies & Nature Class Family & Relationships

Poetry

Morning

Poetry by Yi Sang, translated from the Korean by Michael Joseph Walsh and Jae Kim January 24, 2020

there’s so much of it, this night

Arts & Culture Bodies & Nature

Fiction

Just After the Wave

An excerpt of the novel by Sandrine Collette, translated from the French by Alison Anderson January 14, 2020

Perrine and Noah are hungry. But they don’t know how to wring a chicken’s neck, how to empty out its innards and pluck it.

Bodies & Nature

Audio Poetry

The Empty City

Poetry by Michael Bazzett January 10, 2020

I went to the doctor and found out / there is an empty city inside me.

Bodies & Nature

Fiction

Little Gods

An excerpt of the novel by Meng Jin January 8, 2020

Who have I been? I am an ordinary man, but would my past, put down on paper, make me look cruel?

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Fiction

These Bad Things

Fiction by Danielle Dutton December 23, 2019

One night, when he was seven or eight, she read her son a story from a book called These Bad Things. It was surprisingly scary, and she knew she should stop, but they were so far in. She wanted to see how it ended.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Audio Poetry

Milk Teeth

Poetry by Gale Marie Thompson December 23, 2019

I lean my open neck against yours. / The miracle always returns with a hunger.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Essay

What the Doctor Ordered

By Margaret Wardlaw December 9, 2019

Caring for a dying patient, a pediatrician wrestles with questions of suffering and salvation.

Bodies & Nature Health

Essay

Coming into Bloom

By DJ Cashmere November 26, 2019

Finding love and making peace with impermanence, with a little help from some sunflowers.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

Snow Hare

Poetry by Alycia Pirmohamed November 22, 2019

you know how to pull down a tree / with only your teeth

Bodies & Nature

Essay

Turning, Unfolding, Passing Through

By Ellen Wayland-Smith November 14, 2019

“Past their prime,” my mother says, shaking her head at pears forgotten on the kitchen counter, turning to rot.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Interview

Diana Marie Delgado: The Germ of Someone

By Nicole Treska November 12, 2019

The poet on growing up around storytellers, understanding the charming trickster, and acknowledging women’s trauma.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Interview

Mira Ptacin: What Does It Feel Like to Have a Ghost in the Room?

By Sarah Kasbeer October 28, 2019

In her new book, Ptacin goes deep with mediums and clairvoyants, and embraces the unknown.

Bodies & Nature Religion

Fiction

The Girl Gangs of Pacific Avenue

Fiction by Heather Kamins October 16, 2019

I was out in the front garden weeding between the about-to-bloom tiger lilies the first time I saw them. Four girls in bathing suits and flip-flops, their mouths popsicle red and Italian-ice blue.

Bodies & Nature Gender Sex

Essay

Why We Cry When We’re Angry

By Marissa Korbel October 8, 2019

I feel like an electric line, snapped from the pole by the wind. A live wire. I spark against the ground.

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

Out of Water

Poetry by Luis Chaves, translated from the Spanish by Julia Guez and Samantha Zighelboim October 4, 2019

The sea of simpler songs only the drowned and the fish know to sing.

Bodies & Nature

Fiction

Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts, & Fictions

An excerpt of the novel by Sheila O'Connor October 2, 2019

At first it was a pale shrimp curled pink inside V’s belly; now it is a mammal the size of a small cat. V feels its gnawing paws claw at her ribs, feels the burrow of its skull between her legs, a thrashing angry animal fighting at the cave where it’s been kept.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Interview

Wendy S. Walters: There Is No Neutral Body

By Amy Wright September 25, 2019

Loneliness, anti-blackness, and the need to tell new stories on the 400th anniversary of the first ship carrying enslaved Africans to the New World

Bodies & Nature Race

Essay

I Am Telling You What Happened To Me

By Susannah Nevison September 18, 2019

I keep coming back to the violence before the violence, the moment of narrative rupture.

Bodies & Nature Conflict

Fiction

Carrot Legs

Fiction by Elaine Hsieh Chou September 12, 2019

I brought my lips to my calf and licked. I thought, only for a second, that I could taste the faint bitterness of daikon radish.

Bodies & Nature

Report

Holy Love, Holy Rage

By Darcy Roake August 27, 2019

A female, feminist minister on the personal and political battle for reproductive rights in the South.

Bodies & Nature Justice Religion

Audio Poetry

indelible in the hippocampus

Poetry by Caroline Crew August 20, 2019

Memory is no solid monument but liquid’s / twins of substance and ceaseless swell.

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

Untitled

Poetry by Jane Mead July 25, 2019

The moon in the trees was a good moon, / The world in the sound-bite, a good world.

Bodies & Nature

Lives

Blood Oranges

By Carla Bruce-Eddings July 24, 2019

I watched my skin split, tender and pliant as fruit.

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

Epithalamion in the Field

Poetry by I.S. Jones July 17, 2019

the red, wet animal in my chest throbs Your name.

Bodies & Nature

Lives

Beautiful in the Distance

By Josh Potter June 24, 2019

The tick doesn’t know that it is strong enough to kill a full-grown human. It only knows that it is hungry.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

How A Bird Dies

Poetry by Háel Lopez, translated from the Spanish by Ariel Francisco June 20, 2019

Every bird should have the right / to never touch the ground

Bodies & Nature

Interview

Becoming a Map for Survival: Interview with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

By Lisa Factora-Borchers June 18, 2019

The writer on resisting racist ableist erasure in her latest essay collection about disability justice.

Arts & Culture Bodies & Nature

Fiction

The Paper Wasp

Fiction by Lauren Acampora June 3, 2019

The sun was ruthless, impressing a sense of danger with each step I took away from the road. The heat was primordial, baking through my skin, drying my muscle and bones, desiccating everything but my darkest, wettest core.

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

Dream Seminar

Poetry by Tomas Tranströmer, translated from the Swedish by Patty Crane May 22, 2019

Every dream is crowded with faces and bodies— / there are more dreamed people than there are us.

Bodies & Nature

Lives

Letters to Mothers: Crones, Hags, Witches, and Killjoys

By Sophia Shalmiyev and Leni Zumas May 15, 2019

Mother’s Day is a joke we are all in on, and yet it continues—straight-faced, deadly serious, and poisoned.

Bodies & Nature Gender

Lives

Squirrel King

By Steven A. Miller May 9, 2019

The city didn’t put stop signs at our suburban corner until I was thirteen. Despite the reckless driving, no one was ever killed. Pet dogs and stray cats weren’t so lucky. Neither were the squirrels.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

A Wedding, or What We Unlearned from Descartes

Poetry by Kemi Alabi May 8, 2019

Yes / body, you are owed a whole lake.

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

Frieze

Poetry by Erin Elizabeth Smith April 11, 2019

And I don't know then / how to disappear enough / for neither of us to see me

Bodies & Nature

Lives

Life and Death in West Virginia

By Christa Parravani April 5, 2019

I’m in a haunted place, in my home and in my body.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

Ontological

Poetry by Peter Cooley March 27, 2019

I am the name behind the names, remembering / my origins at the formation of the world.

Bodies & Nature

Audio Poetry

Auto-Immune

By Destiny Birdsong February 27, 2019

I am destined to infuse / survival with meaning, like honey clotting in syringes.

Bodies & Nature

Essay

What Remains

By Jacqueline Alnes February 21, 2019

How can I write a history of myself without remembering? And why am I compelled to?

Americas Bodies & Nature

Fiction

Major Long Talks to His Horse

Fiction by Terese Svoboda February 20, 2019

Innumerable buffalo have the temerity to appear at a distance just as he is solving the problem of the design of a steam carriage. Link them together! he shouts to his horse.

Bodies & Nature USA

Poetry

Swimming Pool

Poetry by Aleš Šteger, translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry February 18, 2019

I accept everything. I renounce everything. / I sink into everything, clothed only in a wet beard.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Essay

White Witchery

By Elissa Washuta February 14, 2019

I just want a version of the occult that isn’t built on plunder, but I suspect that if we could excise the stolen pieces, there would be nothing left.

Bodies & Nature

Interview

Heather Widdows: The Ugly Side of Beauty

By Regan Penaluna January 30, 2019

The philosopher on how our appearance intolerance hinders ideas and human flourishing

Bodies & Nature Gender

Poetry

The Meal

Poetry by Gemma Gorga, translated from the Catalan by Sharon Dolin January 10, 2019

death reviews the menu for the umpteenth time, / repeats our names between its teeth

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

/ˈməT͟Hər/

Poetry by Tiana Nobile December 21, 2018

We tend to our roles like we tend to a fire, / poking the coals with the blazing tip of an iron.

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

Blind River

Poetry by Diane Mehta December 13, 2018

We have long ties to sunlight, / equations that always solve for equality.

Bodies & Nature

Interview

Tyrese Coleman: Writing the Truth, Unbound by Genre

By Sarah Kasbeer December 5, 2018

The author of How to Sit discusses her mixed genre, multi-generational essays about black girlhood, womanhood, trauma, and triumph.

Bodies & Nature Race Sex

Poetry

The Weight of the Sun

Poetry by Charlotte Pence November 21, 2018

I like being / reminded that we all began in dark and stars

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

River

By Amy Roa November 14, 2018

Then one of them kissed a live, flopping catfish and said it was her husband now.

Bodies & Nature

Fiction

Grace

Fiction by Elle Nash October 30, 2018

My body began to itch, as if the unease I felt about the wolf spider was somehow moving from the inside of my body to the outside.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Lives

Late-Life Love

By Susan Gubar October 23, 2018

Old lovers know that love does not conquer all, that our intimacy cannot establish a safe haven somewhere, someplace, for us.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

Little Mouse

Poetry by Robert Walser, translated from the German by Daniele Pantano October 18, 2018

I stood still and said: What is this? / Why do you lie here so quietly?

Bodies & Nature

Essay

When a Scar Is a Choice

By Charlee Dyroff October 12, 2018

A former athlete reflects on the physical reminders of her years on the court.

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

The Stone in the River

Poetry by José Watanabe, translated from the Spanish by Michelle Har Kim October 1, 2018

When we rose up from the murky water / we'd scale it like lizards.

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

Highlands

Poetry by Fatema Roshan, translated from the Persian by Farzana Marie September 6, 2018

Oh, uncles, / what zealous men you are!

Bodies & Nature

Fiction

What We Can Learn from Ancient Asexuals

Fiction by Jane Dykema July 31, 2018

He ran his fingertips over the walls as he passed, as if it were a new wall to him and he wanted to learn about it, as if it kept him attached to earth, as if he might otherwise lift up slowly and never land again.

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

the last prayer

Poetry by Chibụìhè Obi July 23, 2018

i asked this of shame / be a stranger

Bodies & Nature

Audio Poetry

Poet Wrestling with the Possibility She’s Living in a Simulation

Poetry by Rosebud Ben-Oni June 25, 2018

One simulation to another, am I wrong.

Bodies & Nature Technology & the Future

Interview

Porochista Khakpour: Bodily Chaos

By Hillary Brenhouse June 13, 2018

The author on her new memoir, SICK; searching for home; and her struggle to be heard by the medical establishment.

Bodies & Nature Gender Health

Poetry

Eye Bank

Poetry by Ahmad Faraz, translated from Urdu by Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb June 6, 2018

Tell them come take my eyes / Before my body gives out

Bodies & Nature Conflict

Poetry

XV

Poetry by Julio Serrano Echeverría, translated from the Spanish by José García Escobar May 7, 2018

it was near this piece of ocean bed / where their whale ancestors dealt out the sea / as if they were gambling.

Deserts Bodies & Nature

Lives

Animals Died at Our House, and Other Things that Burn or Wear Away

By Autumn Watts May 7, 2018

There was the time I found an entire horse or cow skeleton laid neatly on top of the shed roof. When I asked my brothers what it was doing there, they looked at me patiently and said, We found it in the desert.

Deserts Americas Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Lives

Hello Blood: The Dance of Miscarriage

By Kimi Eisele May 7, 2018

The baby stayed in the desert. I myself stayed in darkness for a long time.

Deserts Americas Bodies & Nature

Essay

Naked in Death Valley

By Claire Vaye Watkins May 7, 2018

Some facts, notes, data, information, statistics, and statements on the hot spring at Lake Tecopa.

Deserts Americas Bodies & Nature

Essay

The Barbecue

By Sofija Stefanovic May 3, 2018

Kissing and kissing at the barbecue.

The Kiss Bodies & Nature

Audio Poetry

[My cadastre of flesh]

By Khal Torabully, translated from the French by Nancy Naomi Carlson April 30, 2018

My cadastre of flesh / dissects me right to the bone

Bodies & Nature

Essay

What Sharp Teeth You Have

By Lauren McCain April 23, 2018

I know how to stay safe among lions in the wild. Around men of my own species, things feel more complicated.

Bodies & Nature Gender

Audio Poetry

Edge of the Wild

Poetry by Leah Umansky April 4, 2018

I am so afraid of being troubled and alone at the end of this world

Bodies & Nature

Essay

How Much Easier to Hate

By Michael Fischer March 15, 2018

A formerly incarcerated writer reflects on what prison can do to a person.

Bodies & Nature Justice

Audio Poetry

History

By Melissa Ginsburg March 9, 2018

We kept the kills quiet / amid rows of pale clover

Bodies & Nature Conflict

Audio Poetry

Some Call It Bounty

Poetry by Alexa Doran February 28, 2018

Before you were born I binge-watched Hoarders.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Essay

Time’s Up for Me, Too

By Karolyn Gehrig February 22, 2018

Where are disabled people in the Time's Up movement?

Bodies & Nature Gender

Interview

Carmen Maria Machado’s Beautiful Bad Dreams

By Emma Copley Eisenberg February 19, 2018

The author of Her Body and Other Parties talks about queerness, writing good sex scenes, and what scares her the most.

Arts & Culture Bodies & Nature

Essay

Mind the Gap

By Maggie O'Farrell February 13, 2018

Fertility challenges after a successful first child often go unspoken.

Bodies & Nature

Fiction

The Details Will Be Ours

Fiction by Celia Laskey January 31, 2018

You meet someone, you fall in love, you get married, you buy a house with three bedrooms, you have two babies, you remodel your kitchen, then you die.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Audio Poetry

Notes on Inheritance

Poetry by Chelsea Dingman January 12, 2018

I stretch my neck into the next life.

Bodies & Nature Gender

Fiction

The Restless

Fiction by Gerty Dambury, translated from the French by Judith G. Miller December 13, 2017

But just because I’m dead doesn’t mean I don’t have things to do. For instance, I’m having a really hard time finding my leg.

Bodies & Nature

Fiction

Neon in Daylight

An excerpt from the novel by Hermione Hoby December 6, 2017

He was in one of those black holes of boozed memory loss, actually inside it.

Bodies & Nature

Audio Poetry

Where Papi’s Angel Speaks to Me About Love

Poetry by Willy Palomo November 29, 2017

mijo—i know you have seen the night / as an excuse to hold your body like a bottle

Bodies & Nature

Fiction

Frangipani

Fiction by Terese Svoboda October 30, 2017

My lover has tied a vine to his ankle and is going to throw himself over a cliff at dawn, with three of the natives.

Bodies & Nature

Essay

Not That Story

By Nalini Jones October 28, 2017

This is a story about what girls must learn and how dangerous it can feel to learn it.

Bodies & Nature Gender

Essay

Search and Destroy

By Susannah Felts October 24, 2017

My daughter has bugs living in her hair. It is my job to kill them.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Interview

Madelyn Kent: How to Write Without Ambition and Resistance

By Raluca Albu October 19, 2017

The teacher on facilitating how to find the place before language.

Bodies & Nature Education MENA

Poetry

Psalm of the Fire Starter

Poetry by Gabriella R. Tallmadge September 20, 2017

"I fled to oceans, I wandered / and found flesh— / some to eat, some to undress."

Bodies & Nature

Fiction

Captain Q Is Dead

Fiction by Mai Nardone September 18, 2017

“They were out of money. Two scaffold monkeys chasing work. But too often it was down a hole, mucking street sewers beside convicts.”

Bodies & Nature Class

Report

The Marsh at the End of the World

By Elizabeth Rush September 6, 2017

Wetlands are some of the world’s greatest carbon sinks, and they're starting to rot: from Maine, an investigation of an ecosystem on the brink.

Bodies & Nature Climate & Environment USA