Our May issue is here! With Serena Meloche’s moving essay on a father’s obsession with the Mars One project and the grief that shadows his absence; Victoria Livingstone’s (@thewritevictoria) sonic meditation on baby babble and the possibilities of untamed language; Maz Do’s story of two sisters reckoning with old wounds and a fraught bond at their mother’s grave; Afabwaje Kurian’s (@afabwajek) story of a Nigerian-American woman visiting her grandfather as her marriage frays; Summer Eldemire’s (@sum.lion) Jamaican love story shaped by a storm that defies all known categories; three poems by Annita Costa Malufe (@annitacostamalufe) mapping the drift of thought across distances both physical and perceptual; a fotonovela by Yhuri Cruz (@yhuricruz) about two Black lovers fleeing slavery in 1820s Brazil; and finally, Nathalie Handal’s (@nathaliephandal) interview with director Awam Amkpa (@amkpa) on his award-winning film The Man Died, inspired by Wole Soyinka’s prison memoirs.
 Read the full issue at the link in our bio! Our May issue also features—courtesy of the artists—striking original art by Yemisi Aribisala (@longthroatmemoirs), Hyeseung Song (@hyeseungs), Jozie Furchgott Sourdiffe (@feistyink), Njideka Akunyili Crosby (@njidekaakunyilicrosby), and Awam Amkpa. (fb)

Some of our favorites lines from our April issue! With Alina Tiphagne’s (@altiphagne) a moving meditation on imagery and queer experience in South India, guest-edited by Meena Kandasamy (@k.a.n.d.a.s.a.m.y); Nina Martinez’s essay about sorting dead bodies into image folders during Duterte’s drug war; Soraya Palmer’s (@soraya.palmer) searing account of the medical violence still inflicted on Black women’s bodies; Yasmin Adele Majeed’s (@yasminadelemajeed) story of fraught glances and family scrutiny; Maria Kuznetsova’s (@mashawritesstuff) story following a struggling Ukrainian-American writer in the aftermath of an ectopic pregnancy; a Global Spotlight of Onaiza Drabu’s (@onaiza) Kashmiri folktale about a child and his caretaker finding their way out of the forest by telling stories; and finally, three poems from the heart of evangelical Queens by Brazilian-born poet Esther Lin (@estherwslin) and three from the plains of Wyoming to the streets of Accra by the Ghanaian-American writer Afua Ansong (@theprof_afua) You can read these pieces—and more—at the link in our bio! (fb)