Nam Hoang Tran is a writer and visual artist based in Orlando, FL. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Posit, Tilted House, Word For/Word, BlazeVOX, New Delta Review, Diode, and elsewhere. More at www.namhtran.com
Blistering | Alasdair Rees
Tyson’s thigh is touching my thigh. Where our legs meet on the bench, the radiant heat from his body moves through the fabric of his pants and the fabric of my pants. It’s a strange communication, I think, taking the last gulp of my mason jar of sparkling rosé. Condensation has gathered on the bottom of the jar, and I cannot help but hold the jar in the final position of my gulp, focusing and unfocusing my eyes; seeing through the bottom of the jar, letting the dew obscure the image; watching the strange blobby shape of Evelyn’s flower, watching it dissolve into an even blobbier smear.
Awash in Elsewhere, Twisted Anew: A Review of Jennifer Soong’s Suede Mantis / Soft Rage
There is a lyrical lilt to Jennifer Soong’s recent book, Suede Mantis / Soft Rage (Black Sun Lit), one could find familiar, yet it meanders from kept usual quarters, the work converses with the breeze, its specificity disarming. Soong’s poems shift us here, there, then back—changed, “moving the meaning again and again away from us.” Her collection in three tempos carries the reader across the span of many-faced moons. Her words reverberate and emit a crosswind memory of what once was, woven with breath, with silence, with tumbled currents “crashing on an adjacent rock.”
Twelve Signs Your 1918 Pandemic Affair Was Better Than a European Getaway | Jean Marc Ah-Sen
The typo on the personalized locket procured on a holiday destination acquires a forced whimsicality that must be recited ad nauseam at parties, which could have otherwise been exchanged for the discreet charm of store credit.