Six years old, hair streaming, you pointed your toes toward the undersides of maples branching through powerlines looping over the school yard. You rose from your seat, thumped on the downswing, pulled the chains, leaned into the next up-swerve. Did you kick your saddle shoes into the littered leaves, did you launch into crinkled… [Read More]
Witness Magazine
Touchless Entry by Hadara Bar-Nadav
Everyone is alive somehow mowing dead grass and fighting pizza boxes into a recycling bin. Things don’t fit right or is that me descending a staircase, splintering apart beneath the morning’s blowtorch sun. … [Read More]
Letter to a Mỹ Lai Mother by Jade Hilde
You’ve always been asked-told you are “Mỹ lai,” meaning American, meaning white. You’ve always been halved. Even though we share the same body, you won’t remember me. Because we became unrecognizable to each other. For what felt like an endless period of time, despite the fact that, by the calendar, it was only a year… [Read More]
Sojourn by Christopher Linforth
Mateo, it is very late. Let me try once more. A few years after the war, I left Hrvatska without a word and started my life again in Norway. Even as I stepped onto the plane, I knew you would be unaware for some time of the circumstances surrounding my abrupt departure. At that moment,… [Read More]
The Little Mermaid by Jennifer Lorene Ritenour
Her scales are the size of silver dollars. Her green hair mystically covers her breasts. Water drips from her fin and turns into pearls that she strings with the thread of her hair. Her pinky nail is the needle. She sits on a rock in the middle of the night, waiting for the boats full… [Read More]
The New Avenues the Only Avenues We Have
by Christopher Citro There were some of us going to become musicians. Some standing in the blue dark beneath lake trees as stars emerged. Some of us— I don’t know what some of us were thinking— for proof the lives we’ve lead since then. I’m learning the creaks of this new house, grow a neuron… [Read More]
A Review of Eryn Green’s BEIT
By Chelsi Sayti This book welcomes the spell of a room. Domestic and meditative, poet Eryn Green is looking out the window of nature and memory to define home. The Yale Younger Poets prize-winner’s second collection, BEIT, praises the newness at the heels of every moment, the connection between the immediate and holy ancient. Judaic… [Read More]
A Review of Two Books by New Issues Press
“It is an embrace meant to renew our energies and replenish our soul.” [Read More]
A Review of Ryan Sallans’ “Transforming Manhood”
“It is an embrace meant to renew our energies and replenish our soul.” [Read More]
Mice-troes: A Review of “The Life and Times of Ward Kimball: Maverick of Disney Animation”
“It is an embrace meant to renew our energies and replenish our soul.” [Read More]
Witness 2020 Literary Awards — Poetry Finalists
New Year
Over the long holiday, three of Parviz’s sisters got nose jobs. Anahita’s came out perfect, like a dwarf rose floating in a porcelain finger bowl. Nasibeh, who along with her twin sister, Niloofar, had just turned twenty-one, woke to the stylish button Niloofar had wanted – a mix-up of the hospital or a twist of… [Read More]
