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Writing from the 2022 Outpost Fellows

November 21, 2022 Essays, Poetry

A note from Outpost founder Ricardo Wilson

Launched in 2022, Outpost is a residency for creative writers of color from the United States and Latin America. Each September, we welcome two writers and award them with a stipend as well as complimentary travel, lodging, and meals to spend a month cultivating a generative writing community in the mountains of Southern Vermont. STEFFAN TRIPLETT and MARICEU ERTHAL, whose work you will encounter below, are exceptionally talented, and we feel quite privileged to have had them represent Outpost’s inaugural cohort. Thanks to the ongoing support of our funding community, we have been able to increase the stipend to $2,000 for our 2023 cohort. Applications are open and will close January 15^th.

Homeless

October 31, 2022 Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

By HUSSAIN AHMED

I woke up to a frozen neighborhood.

I wondered how it ever bloomed

After it got so white and lonely.

Where do the birds hide when it snowed?

All We Are Given We Cannot Hold

October 31, 2022 Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

By ROBERT FANNING

The Common Magazine · “All We Are Given We Cannot Hold” by Robert Fanning

Whirling axis, spine of a spinning top. Love
between us all maybe and blush. Night we press
against us, secret we caress, word we write in steam

[ Heart Fragments ]

October 31, 2022 Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Issues, Poetry

By JOSEPH O. LEGASPI

When you touch me I light up into funereal pyre. In the consummation, by char and carbon, brittle is not my name. I tongue flame and soot and singe. Fire to our forests, fuel for restless fires. Fantastical firebrands undergoing scorching metamorphoses. Oh, love, ether.

Ode to Powerline

October 31, 2022 Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Issues, Poetry

Winner of the 2022 DISQUIET Prize for Poetry

By DARIUS SIMPSON

“if you’re ever lonelayyyy, stop, you don’t have to be.”
—Powerline

you, thrust open leather vest glisten chest in the desert
you, both knee beggin in silver pants plus rain
you, break a lover wide to see what lyrics may flow

Bones and Ghosts

October 31, 2022 Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

By DAVID MILLS

From my row house mailbox, I fished
an envelope: no address, just “David.”
scrawled. In my room, I read: e-mails

bounced back, calls orphaned. If you’re
alive and don’t want to talk I get it.
Though six hours across the Atlantic
is much farther than six along it. If
need be, I will kneel before your grave.
here’s my number. just in case.

Charcoal

October 31, 2022 Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

By TOMMYE BLOUNT

lit by her fire, I was the scorched
tree Clare West found

direction by; a swiftly drawn arrow
became a drawn hood; an era gone

A Wakened State

October 31, 2022 Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry, Poetry Recordings

By SARA MUNJACK

The Common Magazine · "A Wakened State" by Sara Munjack

Ascención

I’ve fallen into an ant pile.
I fight to stand up and shake off
a million legs whispering
across my skin.

I keep dreaming of Chon
before he was my grandfather. A boy
hiding in the desert for days surviving
on nopales y ardillas.

Jerome Sons

October 31, 2022 Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

By TERRI WITEK

I ask my sons what they want from St. Hieronymos, too old to befriend. Red hat, my dead son says. Fat book, my live son requests. No one mentions a lion, meandered in.

The lion asks for an edit= do these sons mark jars filled with body parts? Baboon son, jackal son? They flatten to black-rimmed eyes. No.

I climb through mountain sons. They are finding how far blue takes them. They are learning the ropy muscles of a man (higher animus/ they r anonymous) becalmed in a cave mouth. His red hat and book, the little fire.

Maiden’s Tower

October 31, 2022 Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry, Poetry Recordings

By TARA SKURTU

The Common Magazine · “Maiden’s Tower” by Tara Skurtu

We pass a lighthouse and you tell me the legend—
a seer, an emperor, his daughter, the snakebite;
the tower he built to keep her at the edge of the sea—
when an old woman passes us on the ferry,
sniffs us twice, You are in love, I smelled it!
and last night on the island, over fresh fish
and a pitcher of ice-cloudy raki, I asked how
many words for love in your language: