Blair Johnson

Artist’s Statement I can’t make statements about what I make that will be true for everything, or will be true tomorrow. Sometimes I write poems backwards. I see their shape before I know anything else. Then I try to write under the cloud of this shape, trying to fill it with a narrative that perfectly

Phillip B. Williams

“Everyone is to be held accountable for these stories. Everyone has the ‘sharpest parts’ as a part of them.” Our new Online Editor, Justin Phillip Reed, interviews Phillip B. Williams, author of THIEF IN THE INTERIOR, about the lives of poems, performance and survival, real love, and Beyoncé.

Erin Elizabeth Smith

Alice Attends Bonne’s Wedding Once  you lean into the hole, there’s no going back.  First the fall with its fisted jam and bric-a-brac, your body that hit the leafy earth with a murmured oomph.  There are no ladders tall enough to get you out—here, there is only forward momentum, your lily stilleto tottering toward an