Fiction

Threshold

By Scott Broker December 11, 2023

He felt endangered by the solitude, even at risk of vanishing.

Bodies & Nature Sex

Oil painting depicting still life of meat and dead birds piled up on a table and nearly spilling over.

Essay

On Beauty and Violence

By N.C. Happe December 11, 2023

And now I do the thing I have always hesitated to do — no longer defending, but attacking.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

A black and white illustration of a wildflower meadow.

Fiction

In Bloom

By Katarzyna Szaulińska, translated from Polish by Mark Tardi November 6, 2023

Once the flower emerged, the itch subsided.

Bodies & Nature

Essay The Cutting Room

Hospital Journal

By Kathryn Savage December 13, 2022

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

Bodies & Nature

Audio Poetry

Radical Surgeon of My Own Life

By Jessica Abughattas October 19, 2022

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

Bodies & Nature

Fiction

D Day

By Rachel Khong October 6, 2022

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

Bodies & Nature

Audio Poetry

Aubade

By Marco Yan October 5, 2022

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

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

spirit animal

By Nicole Cecilia Delgado, translated by Urayoán Noel September 14, 2022

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

Bodies & Nature

Sketches

D&C

By Jaydra Johnson August 15, 2022

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

Bodies & Nature

Sketches

Postpartum

By Katherine Dykstra August 15, 2022

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

Bodies & Nature Health

Sketches

Uterus

By Krys Malcolm Belc August 15, 2022

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

Bodies & Nature Gender

Poetry

In the Middle of August, I Saw the Sky

By Romeo Oriogun August 10, 2022

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

Bodies & Nature

Audio Poetry

Bringing Up Mother

By Idman Omar July 13, 2022

I was not dressed correctly when / motherhood interviewed me.

Bodies & Nature

An electrofishing demonstration at Barkley Dam, along the Cumberland River in Kentucky. At the foot of the dam, two men stand on a small boat with long poles in their hands. In the water around them, dozens or hundreds of carp leap out of the water.

Essay

Hook, Line, and Sinker

By Kathleen Blackburn July 12, 2022

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

Bodies & Nature

Essay Spotlights

The Seven-Year Cycle

By ArunDitha July 5, 2022

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

Guernica Global Bodies & Nature

Audio Poetry

If I Say My Body Is Asian Does This Poem Disappear

By Eugenia Leigh June 29, 2022

Another poem mannequin- / Ing the body.

Bodies & Nature

Essay Spotlights

rising to the earth’s height

By Raquel Salas Rivera, translated from the Spanish by Carla Canseco June 21, 2022

The story of the mimosa pudica and the snowshoe hare.

Guernica Global Bodies & Nature

Essay

Steven Returns the Universe

By Adam Roberts March 21, 2022

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

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Back Draft Interview

Back Draft: Meghan O’Rourke

By Meghan O’Rourke and Ben Purkert March 1, 2022

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

Bodies & Nature

Audio Poetry

Tenement

By Kellam Ayres February 23, 2022

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

Bodies & Nature

Apostrophe

To Be Black and Restful on the Body of the Earth

By Amber Officer-Narvasa February 14, 2022

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.

Arts & Culture Bodies & Nature

Lives

Red Tides

By Eiren Caffall February 10, 2022

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

Bodies & Nature Climate & Environment

Sketches

Dirt

By Amy Leach December 6, 2021

The medium of surprise.

Dirt Bodies & Nature

Lives

Abundant

By Mofiyinfoluwa Okupe November 23, 2021

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

Bodies & Nature

Essay

Itasca, Alight

By Clare Boerigter November 22, 2021

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

Bodies & Nature Climate & Environment

A color lithograph of a shark from 1889.

Essay

Shark’s Eye

By Rebecca Flowers November 16, 2021

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

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Essay

Slag

By Ryleigh Norgrove October 20, 2021

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

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

The Show of Growth

By Nakeisha Cantzlaar August 19, 2021

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

PEN America DREAMing Out Loud Bodies & Nature

Interview

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: “I’m one part of the universe, trying to figure out another part of the universe.”

By Lacy M. Johnson August 2, 2021

On quarks, leptons, and the patriarchy.

Bodies & Nature

Fiction

Speed of Mercy

By Christy Ann Conlin July 30, 2021

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.

Bodies & Nature

Audio Poetry

The Women

By Maggie Queeney July 29, 2021

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

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Essay

Mycelium

By Rachel May July 22, 2021

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.

Bodies & Nature

Essay

Out to Sea

By Susanna Space July 15, 2021

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

Bodies & Nature

Essay Photography

Roots of Memory

By Francesca Johanson July 14, 2021

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 Loss Bodies & Nature

Poetry

Take the Bait

By Adele Elise Williams June 17, 2021

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

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

relapse dream

By Anthony Thomas Lombardi May 20, 2021

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

Bodies & Nature

Essay

Wolf Peach

By Hillery Stone May 12, 2021

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

Bodies & Nature

Essay

The Language of Women

By Rachel York May 4, 2021

Searching for the origins of shame.

Bodies & Nature

Fiction

Earthlings

By Jeff VanderMeer April 9, 2021

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.

Bodies & Nature

Review

Cat Dreams

By Lily Houston Smith April 7, 2021

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

Arts & Culture Bodies & Nature

Lives

There’s No Simple Way to Make it OK

By Kathy Davis March 31, 2021

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.

Bodies & Nature Climate & Environment

Poetry

Poem About Human Habits of Consumption That Begins with Contemplating the Walnut in My Yard

Poetry by Felicia Zamora January 14, 2021

Who parted / your shell, in wedge & tear?

Bodies & Nature

Essay

The Grief Artist

By Traci Brimhall January 6, 2021

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

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Commentary

Stitching and Writing on the Margin

By Roslyn Bernstein January 25, 2021

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

Arts & Culture Bodies & Nature

Essay

Year of the Rat

By Simona Blat November 24, 2020

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.

Bodies & Nature

Commentary

Cold Inside: Sexual Climate Change

By Helena Feder November 19, 2020

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

Bodies & Nature Sex Technology & the Future

Poetry

Dispatch from the Clorox War

Poetry by Andrea Cote Botero, translated from the Spanish by Craig Epplin November 19, 2020

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

Bodies & Nature

Essay

On the Road

By Meg Bernhard November 16, 2020

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

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

Ambergris and Gasoline

Poetry by Patrick Meeds October 29, 2020

Imagine what that’s like for the whale.

Bodies & Nature

Essay

Named After the Animal

By Sarah Panlibuton Barnes October 13, 2020

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

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

Clock Hands

By Hua Xi October 1, 2020

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

Bodies & Nature

Fiction

Popol Vuh: A Retelling

An excerpt of the novel by Ilan Stavans September 25, 2020

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.

Americas Bodies & Nature Religion

Poetry

Acarapis woodi

Poetry by Matt McBride September 24, 2020

“Breathing makes us susceptible.”

Bodies & Nature

Poetry

9 dreams

By Nicole Cecilia Delgado, translated from the Spanish by Katie Marya August 27, 2020

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

Arts & Culture Bodies & Nature

Essay

Fever in the Woods

By Hillery Stone August 26, 2020

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

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Essay

Fitness: How the Climate Killed My Children

By Joseph Osmundson August 20, 2020

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

Bodies & Nature Climate & Environment

Fiction

The New Wilderness

An excerpt of the novel by Diane Cook August 14, 2020

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.

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Interview

Diane Cook: “Our humanity is what makes us so particularly wild.”

By Rachel Heng August 10, 2020

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.

Bodies & Nature Lit World

Poetry

Pandemic Jobs for Poets

Poetry by Beth Bachmann August 7, 2020

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

Bodies & Nature

Essay

Alone in the Wilderness, Again and Again

By Amy Marsh July 22, 2020

Dick Proenneke has achieved something mythical: he seems happy.

Bodies & Nature Climate & Environment

Audio Poetry

Home

Poetry by Jamaica Baldwin July 17, 2020

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

Bodies & Nature Family & Relationships

Poetry

[in this ancestral land]

Poetry by Alain Mabanckou, translated from the French by Nancy Naomi Carlson July 2, 2020

barbed wire circling raised voices

Bodies & Nature

Copyright protected. Use of materials from this collection beyond the exceptions provided for in the Fair Use and Educational Use clauses of the U.S. Copyright Law may violate federal law. Permission to publish or reproduce is required.

Essay

The Loneliest City

By Rosa Boshier González 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.

Arts & Culture Bodies & Nature USA

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