You’ve told yourself that your emotions are a burden on your family, your friends, and later, your lovers. You worry about how everyone else feels in response to what lies in your heart and choose to ignore what hurts you. What you feel just isn’t worth talking about. Continue reading
Your name never seemed like it belonged to you. It sounded ridiculous when you said it out loud. It came from your mother, who wanted a bit of greatness, so she named you after Benito Juárez. Continue reading
untitled a handwritten sympathy card, delivered to her front door. her slender hands are flaky because the sadness has aged her, not the years. the phrase “she will never be the same” is crude, but she has no desire to break the surface. she’d rather take a knife to her own brain, creating bite-sized pieces of the torment, especially for us to taste. … Continue reading
Daddy speaks with pride that I am the first lawyer in the family and with relief that I am not the drug-addicted lost soul of his fears. Continue reading
You found me with a whale stoned & poisoned
in my stomach & stars had crusted my eyes for days.
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1. The problem is all inside your head, others will say this.
2.But the problem lingers in your wrinkled bedsheets.
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Criminal “Love is never better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe.” —Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye The winter I move back to my hometown—, degree-bearing, jobless, staying at mom’s—I’m remembering why … Continue reading
Vanessa Mártir, our nonfiction editor for February and March, is a NYC based writer, educator and mama. She is currently completing her memoir, Relentless, and chronicles her journey in her blog: vanessamartir.wordpress.com. A five-time VONA/Voices fellow, Vanessa now serves as the organization’s Workshop Director and the newsletter editor. Her essays have appeared in The Butter, … Continue reading
Our fiction editor for February and March is Dawnie Walton, who is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, NY. As a 2015 fiction fellow at the MacDowell Colony, she continued work on her first novel, a faux oral history about an art-rock duo in the early 1970s. She has been a managing editor for … Continue reading
David Ishaya Osu, a Nigerian poet, is our poetry editor for February and March. His work has appeared in: Eureka Street, Atlas Poetica: A Journal of World Tanka, Birmingham Arts Journal, Vinyl Poetry, Grey Sparrow Journal, RædLeaf Poetry: The African Diaspora Folio, A Thousand Voices Rising: An Anthology of Contemporary African Poetry, among others. David is … Continue reading
The James Franco Review 