The Loneliest City
June 18, 2020
Laura Aguilar’s Southern California photography reveals the intimacy and the isolation that have always been part of the fabric of Los Angeles.
Guernica
A Magazine of Global Arts & Politics
Bodies & Nature
Essay
Commentary
Will COVID-19 Strengthen our Bonds?
May 12, 2020
Living with chronic illness in the midst of a pandemic requires a new map.
Essay
Becoming Animal
May 6, 2020
All of us touching our faces, touching habitats, dislodging species.
Essay
The Pandemic Novelist Has Regrets
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.
Essay
Ordinary Insanity
April 7, 2020
America’s fetishization of reproductive risk is driving mothers mad.
Poetry
Your Name Means Garden
March 27, 2020
What does it mean to graduate / your way through the world?
Essay
Medusa and the Invention of Spells
March 25, 2020
A spell is most effective when you want something and can remember a time it already existed.
LivesPhotography
Faery Land
March 24, 2020
“Don’t take chances,” he said. “Given your history.” But chances, not history, are what we’re given.
Poetry
Hurricanes with the Names of My Friends
March 13, 2020
We are disappearing into / the map’s folds. Small birds. Smaller ones.
Fiction
Schrödinger’s Dog
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.
Commentary
The Cover of My Face
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.
Interview
Darcey Steinke: How to Be in a Body
March 3, 2020
The writer embraces menopause, matriarchy, and the language of the body.
Poetry
[You button this coat as if one sleeve]
February 28, 2020
making room for the night sky / the dead try on
Essay
Beasts of the Fields
February 19, 2020
Family heartache on the northern New York border, and the creatures that bore witness to it.
Poetry
Blank Notes
February 14, 2020
How about adopting a fully grown girl? Says a broken-headed doll.
Fiction
Just After the Wave
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.
AudioPoetry
The Empty City
January 10, 2020
I went to the doctor and found out / there is an empty city inside me.
Fiction
Little Gods
January 8, 2020
Who have I been? I am an ordinary man, but would my past, put down on paper, make me look cruel?
Fiction
These Bad Things
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.
AudioPoetry
Milk Teeth
December 23, 2019
I lean my open neck against yours. / The miracle always returns with a hunger.
Essay
What the Doctor Ordered
December 9, 2019
Caring for a dying patient, a pediatrician wrestles with questions of suffering and salvation.
Essay
Coming into Bloom
November 26, 2019
Finding love and making peace with impermanence, with a little help from some sunflowers.
Essay
Turning, Unfolding, Passing Through
November 14, 2019
“Past their prime,” my mother says, shaking her head at pears forgotten on the kitchen counter, turning to rot.
Interview
Diana Marie Delgado: The Germ of Someone
November 12, 2019
The poet on growing up around storytellers, understanding the charming trickster, and acknowledging women’s trauma.
Interview
Mira Ptacin: What Does It Feel Like to Have a Ghost in the Room?
October 28, 2019
In her new book, Ptacin goes deep with mediums and clairvoyants, and embraces the unknown.
Fiction
The Girl Gangs of Pacific Avenue
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.
Essay
Why We Cry When We’re Angry
October 8, 2019
I feel like an electric line, snapped from the pole by the wind. A live wire. I spark against the ground.
Poetry
Out of Water
October 4, 2019
The sea of simpler songs only the drowned and the fish know to sing.
Fiction
Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts, & Fictions
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.
Interview
Wendy S. Walters: There Is No Neutral Body
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
Essay
I Am Telling You What Happened To Me
September 18, 2019
I keep coming back to the violence before the violence, the moment of narrative rupture.
Fiction
Carrot Legs
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.
Report
Holy Love, Holy Rage
August 27, 2019
A female, feminist minister on the personal and political battle for reproductive rights in the South.
AudioPoetry
indelible in the hippocampus
August 20, 2019
Memory is no solid monument but liquid’s / twins of substance and ceaseless swell.
Lives
Beautiful in the Distance
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.
Interview
Becoming a Map for Survival: Interview with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
June 18, 2019
The writer on resisting racist ableist erasure in her latest essay collection about disability justice.
Fiction
The Paper Wasp
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.
Poetry
Dream Seminar
May 22, 2019
Every dream is crowded with faces and bodies— / there are more dreamed people than there are us.
Lives
Letters to Mothers: Crones, Hags, Witches, and Killjoys
May 15, 2019
Mother’s Day is a joke we are all in on, and yet it continues—straight-faced, deadly serious, and poisoned.
Lives
Squirrel King
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.
Poetry
A Wedding, or What We Unlearned from Descartes
May 8, 2019
Yes / body, you are owed a whole lake.
Lives
Life and Death in West Virginia
April 5, 2019
I’m in a haunted place, in my home and in my body.
Poetry
Ontological
March 27, 2019
I am the name behind the names, remembering / my origins at the formation of the world.
AudioPoetry
Auto-Immune
February 27, 2019
I am destined to infuse / survival with meaning, like honey clotting in syringes.
Essay
What Remains
February 21, 2019
How can I write a history of myself without remembering? And why am I compelled to?
Fiction
Major Long Talks to His Horse
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.
Poetry
Swimming Pool
February 18, 2019
I accept everything. I renounce everything. / I sink into everything, clothed only in a wet beard.
Essay
White Witchery
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.
Interview
Heather Widdows: The Ugly Side of Beauty
January 30, 2019
The philosopher on how our appearance intolerance hinders ideas and human flourishing
Poetry
/ˈməT͟Hər/
December 21, 2018
We tend to our roles like we tend to a fire, / poking the coals with the blazing tip of an iron.
Poetry
Blind River
December 13, 2018
We have long ties to sunlight, / equations that always solve for equality.
Interview
Tyrese Coleman: Writing the Truth, Unbound by Genre
December 5, 2018
The author of How to Sit discusses her mixed genre, multi-generational essays about black girlhood, womanhood, trauma, and triumph.
Poetry
The Weight of the Sun
November 21, 2018
I like being / reminded that we all began in dark and stars
Lives
Late-Life Love
October 23, 2018
Old lovers know that love does not conquer all, that our intimacy cannot establish a safe haven somewhere, someplace, for us.
Poetry
Little Mouse
October 18, 2018
I stood still and said: What is this? / Why do you lie here so quietly?
Essay
When a Scar Is a Choice
October 12, 2018
A former athlete reflects on the physical reminders of her years on the court.
Poetry
The Stone in the River
October 1, 2018
When we rose up from the murky water / we'd scale it like lizards.
Fiction
What We Can Learn from Ancient Asexuals
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.
AudioPoetry
Poet Wrestling with the Possibility She’s Living in a Simulation
June 25, 2018
One simulation to another, am I wrong.
Interview
Porochista Khakpour: Bodily Chaos
June 13, 2018
The author on her new memoir, SICK; searching for home; and her struggle to be heard by the medical establishment.
Lives
Animals Died at Our House, and Other Things that Burn or Wear Away
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.
Lives
Hello Blood: The Dance of Miscarriage
May 7, 2018
The baby stayed in the desert. I myself stayed in darkness for a long time.
Essay
Naked in Death Valley
May 7, 2018
Some facts, notes, data, information, statistics, and statements on the hot spring at Lake Tecopa.
AudioPoetry
[My cadastre of flesh]
April 30, 2018
My cadastre of flesh / dissects me right to the bone
Essay
What Sharp Teeth You Have
April 23, 2018
I know how to stay safe among lions in the wild. Around men of my own species, things feel more complicated.
AudioPoetry
Edge of the Wild
April 4, 2018
I am so afraid of being troubled and alone at the end of this world
Essay
How Much Easier to Hate
March 15, 2018
A formerly incarcerated writer reflects on what prison can do to a person.
Interview
Carmen Maria Machado’s Beautiful Bad Dreams
February 19, 2018
The author of Her Body and Other Parties talks about queerness, writing good sex scenes, and what scares her the most.
Essay
Mind the Gap
February 13, 2018
Fertility challenges after a successful first child often go unspoken.
Fiction
The Details Will Be Ours
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.
Fiction
The Restless
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.
Fiction
Neon in Daylight
December 6, 2017
He was in one of those black holes of boozed memory loss, actually inside it.
AudioPoetry
Where Papi’s Angel Speaks to Me About Love
November 29, 2017
mijo—i know you have seen the night / as an excuse to hold your body like a bottle
Fiction
Frangipani
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.
Essay
Not That Story
October 28, 2017
This is a story about what girls must learn and how dangerous it can feel to learn it.
Essay
Search and Destroy
October 24, 2017
My daughter has bugs living in her hair. It is my job to kill them.
Interview
Madelyn Kent: How to Write Without Ambition and Resistance
October 19, 2017
The teacher on facilitating how to find the place before language.
Poetry
Psalm of the Fire Starter
September 20, 2017
"I fled to oceans, I wandered / and found flesh— / some to eat, some to undress."