Issue 106

Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley on an east Pennsylvania rite of passage.

The voice of your brother’s blood 
is crying to me from the ground.

As a child, I would write letters to god, then fold and throw them behind the wardrobe in my room, as if it were some sort of divine void.

How to do it, how hold
in balance

what misses the mark
and what hits it

That was terrorism,
she says. I know evil.

. . . I love her and how do we

explain her?

The night of my most pain
a new girl came and was put
in the opposite bed.

Jessica Treadway spins a tale of rivalry, scandal, and sacrifice in a small-town church community.

What times these are.
No one knows what’s happening.
The air is filled with words.

The first moment
is this moment,
this one right now.