Latest
September 14, 2026
The Only Visit | Poetry
Ben Purkert
last night I had a small problem with my heart it kept beating doctor inside someone else no doctor I don’t know this other person no I don’t know what my heart wants who knows what anything inside a body is after only a wish to romp around in the grass play in the sun doctor can you do me a favor can you cut yourself open and let me...
September 14, 2026
Year of the No-Talk Rule | Poetry
Sam Bailey
Year of Dead Wrens. Year of Give it Back. L Yearzley, it’s been raining for three straight days, and the drops have stopped guessing. Yearzley of the Wish. Of the Church. The 1 Bus is late again, and I’m standing, again, in the rain. Year umbrellas march like shields to the chivalrous war. If we’d married, Ila would’ve bought us matching shoes. Year of Nikes, Reeboks, the ban on donations....
September 14, 2026
“I wanted to like sports radio” | Poetry
grace (ge) gilbert
I wanted to like sports radio. I wanted to dress like a boy. It makes sense that nothing fulfills me, holding the lemon neatly over the jar. Is this ending. Is this getting what you want. Curled at the foot of grandpa’s staircase, wondering if your blood was easy to clean out of floorboards or of hair. What do you have to do with me. You sang for me, so...
September 14, 2026
Reminiscing Yongsan | Poetry
Park Soran
i loved my lover with pulmonary edema i walked from the joongang university hospital intensive care unit to yongsan post office coughing on the snow warning issued hangang road every time i took a fluttery step like dust carelessly born dead around brinks of redevelopment districts chronic rales leaked from every nook of the city walls stood precariously between skyscrapers draped with x rays each spilled out red phlegm and...
September 14, 2026
Self-Evaluation | Poetry
Rosanna Young Oh
My superior’s superior achieved many firsts. Her white office glowed like an unknowable planet. In five years, I want to be her, I said about my future. The sun never set in her world. There were only challenges, never failures. She called poems insights, and counted the minutes as though she owned them. She was just thought-provoking enough. She echoed other people then asked, How do we measure? Rosanna #1...
September 14, 2026
Hermione Granger | Poetry
Lev Xue
Being a beautiful young man gets you where? Where does it get you in China? A beautiful young man on the way to the “flower ocean” A beautiful young woman behind him on a silent electric motor bike the kind of motorbike that can be manufactured in a chain of ten thousand events regarding the division of labor wow so clean their beauty i could not stop looking also the...
September 14, 2026
How to Build a Chair | Poetry
Steve Roberts
I’ve made hundreds of chairs, some took a lot of effort and some were easy. Some took procurement, or luck, or fighting against my fear of humiliation. Some of them are so chair-like it’s uncanny. Most of them exist only in my mind. Some of them were meant to be something else but ended up as chairs. I don’t have a problem with that. There are so many ways to...
September 14, 2026
Into the Funhouse Mirror | Anonymous A.I. Confessional
Former Marketer at a Product Management Firm, Hollywood Screenwriter, Ivy League Literature Professor, Ivy League Postdoc, Literary Agent, Magazine Editor and Writer, New York Times Best-selling Author, News Reporter, PhD Student in History, Prominent Novelist, Psychiatry Fellow, Software Engineer at a Big Five Tech company, Unemployed Anthropologist, Union Organizer
At a May event in Poland, the novelist Olga Tokarczuk revealed that she had asked an A.I. chatbot to suggest songs the protagonists of her latest novel might have heard at a dance set decades ago. And her queries weren’t limited to questions of historical fact: “Often I just ask the machine, ‘Darling, how could we develop this beautifully?’” she continued. “In literary fiction this technology is an advantage of...
September 14, 2026
An Automatized Path
Ivy League Literature Professor
A Haircut Story. Only An Inch. Must It All Go? Titles like these began to populate my Amazon suggestions. Mostly self-published, with covers that featured lusciously long, supernaturally straight women’s hair. Just the hair, streaming down the length of the cover. No faces showing. I could not figure out what algorithm I had triggered, or how, until, a few weeks later, I looked at my eleven-year-old daughter’s search history and...
September 14, 2026
An Ideological Inflection Point
Union Organizer
When union leadership announced to staff that we should all begin using Claude, the “ethical” A.I. of choice, I was disgusted but not surprised. Since I’d joined the union as full-time staff, use of A.I. had become increasingly normalized. Rally flyers featured raised fists with six fingers. Emails to union members were overrun with em dashes and emojis. The allure of A.I. as a way of boosting productivity is difficult...
