GASTROPODA

MURMURATION the firmament welcomes flight in dim light of fading day, when starlings return to roost staccato chirps give way to...

the marine biologist is an expert fish assassin— icthyocide is an artform and he has learned from the masters. none but the rarest, most...

after Danusha Laméris The game dupes us all at first. We play hard, scars fading faster than their stories, time’s twirl only a number. I...

my ungrateful tongue, its surface area taste insults the decadence of your golden mango flesh to your richness, heaping mounds of bazaar...

You say you can’t bear to live with my parents anymore. I love them, but I choose you, so we move out of their warm basement and into an...

After Hanif Abdurraqib An endless room with endless windows / and the view outside is just better out of some windows than others / at...

Follow the irrigation ditch beyond the railway line and you come to a thicket of willow trees. Between them the hem of a chain-link fence...

I would be a plant in your garden and be happy for a short life, hearing nothing but your thoughtless song, watching you feel the sun...

In 1905, Mina Benson Hubbard led a successful expedition across the Labrador wilderness, then published A Woman’s Way Through Unknown...

after Jack Gilbert* We come home every morning after a walk, small marks of sweat in the underarms of our t-shirts; our lips entering the...

Oops! usually followed by a wink. A few times a month. How do you keep them all straight? Weekly, probably. Have you ever heard of...

I want to push our cities together like tectonic plates. under a fig tree in Greenpoint the light is looking strangled and my dress in...

They were heart-shaped lollipops stuck to your jumper, black raindrops splattered up your calves and across the hem of your Sunday best...

As the moon lifts her swollen self into the dulling sky, some ancient stirring pulls me to the wilderness, where, like an augur, I root...

Editor's note: When I first read "A Splitting Open," I was five months pregnant with my first child. I published it about four months...

My mother knows a trick that turns grief to sugar and she hides it all in her ageing spine. Last winter, a sadness drenched my father-...

Why do the geese cross the road to the clinic? To get to the other side where the grass is taller and full of feed. They have no idea how...

The fallen leaves scatter like chickens. A squadron of ducks floats on the river, silently paddling upstream, hunting among the rocks and...

Less make-believe and more, belief-making - is the sea’s love for me. Under a commotion of jealous stars, it rushes around me emptying...

Emma Burger is a writer, healthcare professional, and end-of-life doula. She splits her time between Ann Arbor, Michigan and New York...