This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
even baby’s breath is weary and stale
in their nostrils falls the hail
the country’s black men sent to jail
(poetry)
Author: Another Chicago Magazine
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
You are forced to think very formally, very
philosophically, Someday a siren will come for you,
and you hold your breath, rub your eyes, roll
with a groan to flick on the late Late Late Show.
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
One guy said I looked like Queen Elizabeth in it,
so I wore it everywhere, led entrances
with hip swishes and a smirk,
blasted “Flagpole Sitta” in my headphones
because it was my baddie girl-esque era.
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
Despite what you may think,
I am comfortably phallic.
I wonder if your punchline
can live for two hundred years,
burrowing through human muck
and blood and flushed tissues.
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday. This is the first.
through my brother’s bedroom door, the expectations of manhood
complete: apology, sincerity, apology—take it and move on.
In my bedroom alone, shaking, I have prayed the old prayers too.
(poetry)
One of the essential qualities of my mind has always been an inability to distinguish between “being” and “being with.” I wanted to play with girls, and hence decided, age eight, that I wanted to be a girl. Why is it, I asked myself and the sky, as I continued down Grand Street, that the current trans debate focuses so much on trans women in sports? Rather than on, say, sports?
(nonfiction)
When I traveled to Geneva, no matter what else was on the agenda, a reservation at the Boeuf Rouge was required. I never changed my order from quenelle de brochet. I looked forward to the quenelles more than any other part of my visit; they were a reliable, savory anchor in my itinerant young life.
(nonfiction)
Part of a series of Native poetry collected by Mark Turcotte.
did you know trees grieve one another?
i wonder how long they hold grief in their bodies
i wonder how grief sticks in tree ring?
(poetry)
I would need help to enter, hesitatingly, into my mother’s sick body, to bite into her cancer, twist it every which way, let it melt on my tongue like a communion wafer, pierce it with my teeth and let out all its juice, its pus, lick my fingers. It would definitely taste like something unfamiliar, but I’d continue, that’s how the abscess would burst, how I’d heal my mother, how I’d heal from my mother, it would be enough for me to swallow her whole, she would be in me, and I’d spit her out again to rid myself of her.
(fiction)
“One of the overwhelming and heartbreaking themes of mass incarceration is dehumanization. Time and time again, these stories of what happens to prisoners in any of these systems gets buried under all of the legal jargon. And the back and forth in courts, the many steps that happen take power away from the incarcerated and erase the story of the individual,” Chloe Accardi tells ACM.
