Author: gulfstreamlitmag

Some ghosts are my fathers, forever testaments to ragelove, undertow, imprint of baseball stitches on the temple. Not king, not priest, not urchin, but sad patient drugged asleep in the psychiatric wing.   Not all ghosts are fathers. I’ve counted them as I walk the suburbs. Some are rabbits wearing moonrise like an oversized firefighter’s […]

In my gym shoes, I drew the striped blocks of my Japanese name, strained   and skewered during roll call until I sounded like an exotic bird   or an Asian cell phone brand. People used to ask my mother   where I was adopted. She did not give me her tall frame, pale eyes, […]

A consortium of hips, thick hips, the unionized and synchronized   alike. Tough hips like rhino hides herringboned around the watering hole,   assorted like the trove of rubber pencil tops we picked through in elementary school—   do you remember mornings hunting for quarters, earned or not, for god   knows what? It’s still […]

A couple of years ago I went out for a drink with a fellow I had briefly dated. Our dating was the kind that happens when you meet someone on vacation (in this case our best friends’ wedding), and keep in touch after you’ve returned to your respective cities. Emailing, talking on the phone, exchanging […]

a worn tide     I retreat shallows joining the deep the way life crushes life thirst malignant in each arc’s rise     sighs in its fall heartbeats lapping up hours before fading     obscure in still chambers purled clean   a crest glossed in sun breeze I’m no part of the swell after all     maybe churned in its […]

Our big golden dog twitches in yelping contentment as he dreams at my feet his dreams of a perfect canine heaven, where chased, and chasing, he forever runs with us, while upstairs you sleep, I imagine, so   the dream in you might tendril itself out of your long brown hair and suffuse the air […]

*This interview took place at the 2018 Miami Book Fair.* Bri Griffith: Yesterday, I was at the “If They Come For Us: Four Fierce and Tender Debuts” panel, and the poets [Fatimah Asghar; Marcelo Hernandez Castillo; Tiana Clark; José Olivarez] ended their reading with thoughts on slowing down, learning how to be human. What are […]

How many costumed women does it take to push a turn-of-the-century space capsule into a launcher? When no one knows what’s beyond the breathable, it’s easy to imagine how a few well-dressed men could hammer rivets to a rocket and make it fly. It looks like they’re inserting a giant tampon into a giant pea […]

Fiction “Everglades City” by Dawn Abeita “Worship” by Cedric Synnestvedt Non-Fiction “Spinstering” by Catherine Johnson Poetry “After Watching A Trip to the Moon” by Kathryn Smith “Cabeza De Vaca Weathers the Gulf” by Lesley Clinton “Girl Western” by Anna Tomlinson “I Have Never Been A Horse” by Ja’net Danielo “Linen Anniversary” by Dante Di Stefano “Office Politics” […]