The Fall Issue | 2024
At long last, our Fall 2024 issue is here. Check back daily throughout the month of November to read a true harvest of poems, stories, art, and criticism that we’ve curated for you this autumn.
At long last, our Fall 2024 issue is here. Check back daily throughout the month of November to read a true harvest of poems, stories, art, and criticism that we’ve curated for you this autumn.
At long last, our Fall 2024 issue is here. Check back daily throughout the month of November to read a true harvest of poems, stories, art, and criticism that we’ve curated for you this autumn.
Stephan Delbos on the poetry of Tim Dlugos and Danzez Smith, two poets whose poetry clarifies the evolving relationship between American society & AIDS and shows how poetry can follow truth through taboo.
Four recent volumes of poetry, prose, and letters, reviewed by our editors.
B O D Y interviews Scott Kiernan, a New York-based artist whose video, photo and installation works interact in ways that address their own materiality and means of distribution.
I can paint phrases that capture my man / veiled and leaning over a hive, ungloved hands / lifting frames aswarm with bees, finding the queen
There was a space at the table / for a child who’s face I’d already seen. / Who had arrived with a smile in the shape / of a blade. I composed a psalm because / I longed to make up a story that wasn’t true
sometimes a bottle // holds me like a tentpole / sometimes // it’s the other way round; and we bottle- /
neck / we flagship each-other.
He is not our first dead tourist. We have had copter incidents, people cutting legs on ice, avalanche victims. One lady fell down a mine shaft. The boy from the Lone Star State had just graduated high school. That’s why he was here, to celebrate the possibilities of his future.
Wine river of melted crowns / calls me home from the forest. // On the bank I drift, I mark / my bright axe laid down to rest.
How many times did I tell the children? We got this by a stroke of luck, and to luck it might return. Don’t fold it into the shape of a paper airplane. Don’t bet it on a game of chance or skill. Don’t draw it or dream about it.
Mom ruined her $350 wedding dress running barefoot through a cornfield. The hem gathered silky topsoil like the wind.
My strangeness as unsavable / as the herd / on the other side of this wall / that will, at a single sound, run full tilt / into oncoming headlights
I got spit on while I was walking down the street, going home after a bad date with the son of a guy who wrote a book that got turned into a movie that was way more popular than the book. And a homeless guy spit on me.
I am learning what men do and why they do it. Today, my father / teaches me fear. Mother watches from the house. I watch as if I am outside // myself
It’s something about the goats. / When I go to see them, they rush / to the side of the pen where I stand
For a moment, the whole pub seemed paralysed by the affront. It’s him, it’s him, he doesn’t want beer, he doesn’t want beer—the words carried from one table to the next, and the spark jumped all the way outside.
“I’m pregnant, Einstein…” Magda told him at the end of the summer. “You need to come with me and appeal to the commission…” She sat calmly in front of him as if this was something she did every other day.
My algorithm and I go way back. His name is Allen. And Allen has helped me through some tough times.
those days won’t come back but at least we don’t have to talk in complete sentences now
Your laughter. / It seems so harmless. / A roof made of boulders. /
Things inside your body that have never gotten out.
When the rain slowed, I walked the dog / from whom I wrested one bottlecap, one shoe. // Clicked on a link to a network of bail funds, / found my country, my state. Hovered.
See if anyone is / watching. No one is // watching. The water laps / around you like applause.
© 2024 | B O D Y | bodyliterature.com