Only one way to get rid of the curse: kiss the tombstone and apologize. Speak the name of the dead.

Poetry in performance is about the full body on the stage. The tremor in the poet’s hands, their voice shaking, their mismatched socks.

Starling phalanx westward on the grass, jabbing the earth...

He grapples, words for the paltry effort of holding one’s heart out to another, whispering here....

I listen to the friend who tells me outrage is painful, but at least it spurs you to action...

My clawlike pleas for amnesty are met only with the bestial blueprints of a brooding ballroom Bluebeard

To be you is to be loved, in limitless capacity and direction...

Piss on the ashes of the Oval Office if it feels safe. Topple the archaic statues, Watch them sink under ice cold lakes. Go.

A legend tells you how to read a map. Not where you’ll trip and sprain your ankle, though...

There blows an ill wind where reality & contradictions converge, the wind that warns us not to dwell in the past, but to pay attention...

Let us not postpone the intent of our dreams. We’ve been chasing It so long

Okay. I accept that. I give up on trying to stay on the outside. So I’m here today to claim the title Vampire-American. I wear it proudly.

His eyes returned to the serpent. All of his plans, he ruminated, the remaining years with Bev, the Florida home now under contract...

[Rather] than leaving these spaces feeling that the traumatic event has been adequately addressed, [a trauma metaphysic remains].

For many, words are sacrosanct only insofar as they are bluntly instrumental.  They must be instantly efficacious, dense as a rock...

Elaina Erola won the Maria Spiridonova Remembered Writing Contest with her essay "What Their Spirits Know," but check out the runners-up!

and she sends me videos of a possum eating as if i am not right here. her very own possum

from my tooth and claw warren where only truth rotates, dripping as a libertine fueled by Romanticism from my extending canines

The elite decide who and how many will be remembered, and who and how many will be forgotten. 

The place for Native American women is treacherous. We no longer live on the battlefield fighting our enemies, but...