Since 1968
I find myself with a bit in my mouth from time
to time. That means that I am bearing all the weight.
That means that I am bridled and tamed. I am
certainly carrying a man— I may or …
A horse
Leans into the coyote’s attack,
Presses against teeth,
Submits to claws, to
Defer the pain
of Torn flesh, of
Severance.
You, a horse,
Leave your last happiness,
Fly across the Atlantic to the father who
Pounded worthlessness …
wide hemisphere of roiling and din
flung mud as a tank rolls by
soon blood will river the road
the emptying of soul in order to
kill, obey orders, kill
who we are in the shadows
across the border, arms …
at a Love’s travel stop, through the portal of Love’s travel
a day’s idle moving, nothing crystallized,
mildly frictionless, and further only feeling
we’ve been at this stop before…
overlapping patterns ripple at edges
merge into that which bonds us, …
Even after twenty years on North Chelton Road,
I never ate a plum from the tree my dad planted
in our backyard because the deer always beat me
before I could know what came from the blossoms
they nibbled on, …
Nathan is spending his thirtieth birthday alone in a diner. Alone unless you count the pretty, distracted woman in glasses—the only other patron—sitting several booths down. And he does. Nathan leafs through a menu he knows well, stealing glances as …
Before I got lost in that big porno theater on Astoria, my therapist told me how his husband wasn’t really his husband. He said that his husband had been a friend who’d been terminally ill and that his literal dying …
Naz Riahi (she/her) is a director and writer. Much of her work explores the spaces, emotions and opportunities of otherness and isolation, informed by her experiences as an immigrant from Iran.
She was named one of …
