Words try to blot death up, but death leaks faster than language can soak.

To wait for something to open, that’s optimism.

It would happen painlessly, God assured, although what did God even know, Ruby wondered, about pain?

Another year of rain and terrible air, then I see the street again —

At this point, / my body’s beastly smell / starts to be all that matters.

I didn’t choose to become an alcoholic. But I did have the choice to remain childless.

Her swollen breasts leaked colostrum through a printed green sheath dress that she had sewn herself.

Creation, reproduction, was supposed to be my inheritance, my potential; I, too, was once a daughter cell.

One morning, on a wet day during the week...

I was not dressed correctly when / motherhood interviewed me.

Invasive species are a problem not only of trade and climate change but also of language.

This is my introduction to dying. It is a good place to die — in a Changi Women’s Prison cell.

Another poem mannequin- / Ing the body.

The story of the mimosa pudica and the snowshoe hare.

If grief were a weapon, what shape would it take?

The memoirist talks about the limitations of “the traditional illness narrative” and what healing really means.

I’d been undoing myself for years. / Why would this day be any different?

I wonder what it means for me to shape my body inside a lineage of men’s conquest, inside a received tradition of mastery over land and gender.

My father, and the ecosystem I loved, were both slipping away.

The medium of surprise.

This body, your body, is always ready — for love, for affection, for pleasure, for decadent songs of praise.

I was twenty the first time I saw wildfire reduce a forest to moonscape.

The more I learned about the pain humans can cause each other, the more I turned to sharks.

Out to sea with the longest human- and wind-powered sailing race in North America.

"And right there and then, I showed her, I wouldn’t be of much use."

On quarks, leptons, and the patriarchy.

Mal wanted to prove she was more than a thirty-year-old podcaster and obscure short-story writer living in her mother’s garage apartment gobbling mango lassi and Doritos.

more than the men, even. The ones who looked / like I looked.

The part we see is just the fruit; there’s a whole network of fungi underground, a system underneath the forest floor that sustains the trees, carries nutrients in white webs.

It was clear that in addition to the physical damage, the whales had experienced severe psychological distress.

The next installment in the Memory Loss series, exploring public and private remembrance in New York City, unearths the complex lives of living memorials.

“Memory. Now that’s a thing a girl / can get behind.”

"& when will i be emptied by what a night doesn’t promise instead of what it does”

We are biologically driven to make more of ourselves, and propagate the earth, and steer our sisters from madness.

Searching for the origins of shame.

You tunneled into reason: that many earthlings you had observed had enjoyed ecstatic many moments already where they had relaxed into the comfort of being invisible.

Doris Lessing’s unsentimental book On Cats provides strange comfort during a pandemic.

I was enamored with the notion that all I had to do to drive the sadness away, to have something to look forward to, was open a can of meadows.

Who parted / your shell, in wedge & tear?

In the wake of a loss comes the urge to create.

Former journalist Sabine Heinlein is charting the history of zoonotic diseases not on magazine covers, but quilts.

The rat marks this year as the beginning of some kind of new cycle, though what will be new, and whether or not it will be good, is unknowable.

Even before the pandemic, no one wanted to have sex. Now desexualization is a global crisis.

I believe there are two worlds. / In one of them I clean it all, / all the time.

I loaded up on hand sanitizer and masks, and sketched out a route that would take me to places I’d never seen before.

Imagine what that’s like for the whale.

My beloved gave me language instead of seed. I let it grow in the places where my loss emptied me out.

My bones say / don’t you have any place to be.

In a similar way, a child is like saliva: the parent’s essence is in it. The face of his parents is in the child’s, although at times one must look hard to find it.

“Breathing makes us susceptible.”

I feel as though I’ve dreamed / something terrible, but I don’t remember / what.

Tucked far away with my children, this is where I feel safest and most afraid.

If we won’t change to save ourselves, what hope is there for our children?

Agnes smiled through the pain. “They wouldn’t,” she said almost shyly, and Bea watched Agnes’s face contort, trying to imagine coyotes snuffling her hair.

The author reflects on writing the physical world into fiction, what makes someone a “bad mom,” and what a wilderness community has in common with The Office.

Young poets join the army: burial of the dead is already / on your resume.

Dick Proenneke has achieved something mythical: he seems happy.

I was mesmerized by how willing her skin / was to leave her.

barbed wire circling raised voices

Laura Aguilar’s Southern California photography reveals the intimacy and the isolation that have always been part of the fabric of Los Angeles.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

making room for the night sky / the dead try on

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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