While Housesitting for a Family Visiting Bordeaux

I am rinsing mango juice off my / thighs when I notice its slim // body shimmying before me, / slicing through the crisp, // chlorinated water with ease.
Pet Ghost

An idea so fleeting it’s mere outline, dim constellation. / I think of abducting you— // a consideration as gentle and banal as what fruit to buy / for the week. It’s really only the word that compels, // abduct, abducere, to lead away as if by the hand, lovingly.
Baby

My grandma was kind of a pill. I wasn’t sure what to feel when you told me she died. I had just gotten home from work. I was still wearing my apron.
Inquisitor and Insurgent: Black Woman with Pencil, Sharpened

At the young age of twenty-nine, Lorraine Hansberry was an activist, intellectual, and acclaimed American writer. A triptych that made me lick the tip of my pencil.
Alignment

I have begun collecting gemstones and leaving them in melamine bowls on my deck when the astrological signs are changing, or when the moon is full, or when rain is expected so I can cleanse them.
Lucretius

One day Bindi, the one in our radical group in Milan we all looked up to, held me back after we were done giving out flyers for the Desaparecidos in Argentina.
The Winemaker Has A Story He’s Going To Tell You Whether You Like It or Not

The tasting room is a dozen steps down from the tourist-packed street and at least ten degrees cooler. Abby lets out a relieved sigh and flaps her arms at the elbow to dry the pit sweat from her dark t-shirt.
A Family Thing

And he thought of his father, and of how he had always thought as a boy that a man was a family thing, and he thought that the next time he went home, he would tell his father that he knew now that a man was not a family thing, that he was not firstly a family thing at least.
Like Family

During the spring semester of my international graduate program, I responded to an ad for a babysitter. The father wrote back and invited me for an interview. I consulted my Amsterdam map, hopped on my bike, and found their address, a house somewhere on the edges of affluence.
Artist: Sarah Barnett
Featured in Volume 12.1 Previous Next Read Volume 12.1
Artist: Samantha Park
Featured in Volume 12.1, 12.2, and 13.1 <figure><img src=”https://bloodorangereviewwp-staging.wc.reclaim.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/seo-ryung-samantha-park-dollar-store-roses-150×150.jpeg” alt=”seo ryung samantha park dollar store roses” /></figure><figure><img src=”https://bloodorangereviewwp-staging.wc.reclaim.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Seo-Ryung-Samantha-Park-Psychology-101-150×150.jpeg” alt=”Seo Ryung Samantha Park Psychology 101″ /></figure><figure><img src=”https://bloodorangereviewwp-staging.wc.reclaim.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/seo-ryung-samantha-park-unattainability-ode-150×150.jpeg” alt=”seo ryung samantha park unattainability ode” /></figure><figure><img src=”https://bloodorangereviewwp-staging.wc.reclaim.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/5-150×150.jpeg” alt=”5″ /></figure><figure><img src=”https://bloodorangereviewwp-staging.wc.reclaim.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Samantha-Park_s-with-Itiola-Jones-Vanity–150×150.jpeg” alt=”Samantha Park” /></figure><figure><img src=”https://bloodorangereviewwp-staging.wc.reclaim.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Samantha-Park_s-with-Angbeen-Saleem-–-Ghazal-by_to_for-Qandeel-Baloch-150×150.jpg” alt=”Samantha Park” /></figure><figure><img src=”https://bloodorangereviewwp-staging.wc.reclaim.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Samantha-Park_s-with-Kenneth-Carroll-A-Charles-Brown-Christmas-150×150.jpeg” alt=”Samantha Park” /></figure> Previous Next <a href=”https://bloodorangereviewwp-staging.wc.reclaim.cloud/volume/13-1/” role=”button”> Read Volume […]
Artist: Azzah Sultan
Work Featured in Volume 12.1 Previous Next Read Volume 12.1
The Minglement of Nikky Finney: The Architecture of a Poet

Conducted by Kelly Norman Ellis
Volume 11.1
POETRY
Hotbed 11

There are women who wait at the door until you arrive like you said you would. Women who stand at the screen with their elbows poking in at the wire like original tuning knobs made of fossilized walrus bone.
