Cover Photo: This is a close-up photograph of an ant on a white background. The ant is walking and looks a bit curious, its antennae pointing forward.
Photograph by Peter F. Wolf/Unsplash

Ode for the Ants: A Love Song for My 2021 Generator Students

Have you ever walked into a room of twelve strangers sitting quiet at a long table, bodies poised toward the nervous, generous edge of a year-long wade into manuscript-making?

“An entire life / of loneliness swings / upside down” - Julian

“It must be my mother / folding me / with her prayers” - Ahmed

“I long not to be an elegy, / yet” - DeShara

“Who but fools believe the weatherman when he gives a forecast? - Siri

Live the shred. / Do not divert / the heart’s traffic.” - Sarah

“And the space between me and myself / who is also yourself, / loses all its room” - Hayley

Starting firmly this coming Monday, March 16th in-person classes will not be held.

“The Tagalog word for pomegranate is Granada. / Having eaten what I can’t detonate, I agonize” - Steffi

“I wish to crash/ without words into the sleep / but wolves keep crouching in my dreams” - Alex

Thank you/ I needed this today

“The nation of our/ love sits in the sky, pressed and purple” - Chelsea

“All portraiture and all self-documentation is reconciliation” - Lana

the sustenance sometimes five thousand times our own weight. Deliberate and devoted, antenna tuned towards the turn of the 6th line into the 7th.

“My hair spooling like its / never seen daylight” - Maryam

“If time is a line / mine traces / a crack in the sky / wet sidewalk / until it finds/ an explosion of green / fighting through” - renée

re interested in studying with Angel, her next 12-month class begins in February. Apply by December 15th if youd also like to apply for financial aid!

continental breakfast at wilshire & hope

“Before You Go, I Want to Love You”

a book named sirianna (for Gunnar Ulstad)

my depression as punishment for desire

you can run but you can’t hide

Where we go to be together

“Family Tied”

“Gising”

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Sitting On a Bed In The Middle Of The Milky Way

Angel Nafis is a Cave Canem Fellow and author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press). Her work has appeared in The BreakBeat Poets, Buzzfeed Reader, The Rumpus, Poetry, and more. She represented the NYC at the National Poetry Slam and the Women of the World Poetry Slam. An Urban Word NYC Mentor and founder, curator, and host of the Greenlight Poetry Salon. Recipient of the 2016 Ruth Lilly Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and the 2017 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, she is an MFA Candidate in Poetry at Warren Wilson College. With poet Morgan Parker she is The Other Black Girl Collective.