“from Elam House (Austin, Minnesota)” by G.C. Waldrep is our Poem of the Week. G.C. Waldrep’s most recent books are feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America; The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021); and The Opening Ritual (Tupelo, forthcoming 2024). Recent work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Paris Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Yale Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Conjunctions, and other journals. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University.   from E ..read more

“This Body is a Songbird in a Kiln” by Athena Nassar is our Poem of the Week. Athena Nassar is an Egyptian-American poet, essayist, and short story writer from Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of the debut poetry collection Little Houses (Sundress Publications, 2023). She is the winner of the 2021 San Miguel Writers’ Conference Writing Contest, the 2021 Academy of American Poets College Prize, and the 2019 Scholastic National Gold Medal Portfolio Award, among other honors. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Academy of American Poets, The Missouri Review, Southern Humanities Review, Plei ..read more

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal. In Paul Curley’s “The Side Effects,” a recently bereaved father and his thirteen-year-old daughter find out they aren’t related and have to adapt to the strange new parameters of their relationship. At her request, Tom takes Fallon on a road trip to meet her “birth dad”—his dead wife’s former lover. A runner-up in TMR’s 33rd Annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize competition, “The Side Effects” is about the distances we sometimes have to travel before we can love the peopl ..read more

“Faith” by Nur Turkmani is our Poem of the Week. Nur Turkmani lives in Beirut and researches social movements, gender, displacement, and agriculture. Her writing appears in West Branch, The Offing, Poetry London, The Adroit Journal, and others. She studied creative writing at Oxford University and is an editor at Rusted Radishes: Beirut’s Art and Literary Journal.   Faith On the drive from Ehden, we roll down our windows for mountain air. Below us, the clouds, a landscape of cotton, and my mother sighs from the passenger seat, Thank God for beauty, then recites an ayat from the Qur’an. My ..read more

Recently, TMR intern Shayla Malone interviewed Robert Long Foreman about “Song Night,” which tells the story of a pot-smoking father who has to adapt to the fact that his teenage daughter is following in his footsteps. First published in TMR issue 46.4 (Winter 2023), “Song Night” is a tender, funny account of what it looks like to grow—and grow closer together—in the midst of change. You can read it here.   Shayla Malone: In “Song Night,” marijuana is a catalyst for character bonding. What inspired you to write about weed? Robert Long Foreman: This is the story’s most autobiographica ..read more

“Love Poem for Lois” by Regan Green is our Poem of the Week. Regan Green grew up in Columbia, Tennessee, and now lives in Baltimore. She is a junior lecturer in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and the Assistant Editor of Birmingham Poetry Review. Other poems of hers have appeared in Best New Poets 2023 and The Southern Anthology, Volume X.   Love Poem for Lois Lois of the yellow duplex up the street, your pierced frenulum winked when you lifted your tongue to say lump crab, lady parts, light as in do you have a, the tongue skewered. You said, Angel bite. My mother said, W ..read more

“Gray” by Melissa Ginsburg is our Poem of the Week. Melissa Ginsburg is the author of the poetry collections Doll Apollo (winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award) and Dear Weather Ghost, the novels The House Uptown and Sunset City, and three poetry chapbooks: Arbor, Double Blind, and Apollo. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Image, Guernica, Kenyon Review, Fence, Southwest Review, and other magazines. Originally from Houston, Texas, Melissa studied poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the Un ..read more

“Pharmacy Museum Tour Guide, New Orleans” by Andy Young is our Poem of the Week. Andy Young’s second full-length collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her work has appeared or will soon in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Pidgeonholes, and Drunken Boat. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers, she teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. With Khaled Hegazzi, she translates poetry from Arabic, published in Los Angeles Review of Books and the Norton anthology Language for a New Century.   Pharmacy Museum Tour Guide, N ..read more

“Prayer Meeting” by Michelle Bitting is our Poem of the Week. Michelle Bitting was short-listed for the 2023 CRAFT Character Sketch Challenge, the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the 2021 Coniston Prize and 2020 Reed Magazine Edwin Markham Prize. She is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and recently named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist is forthcoming in 2024. Bitting is writing a hybrid novel about her great-grandmother, stage an ..read more

In Rohini Sunderam’s “Vegetable Stories,” first published in TMR issue 45.3 (Fall 2022), an unconsummated romance buds, flourishes, withers, and endures in dormant form for two people who communicate their feelings for each other through vegetables, stories, and art. Vegetable Stories Rohini Sunderam   Gurgaon in the 1980s still had an air of innocence. The roads were dusty and potholed. The trees were young, their new leaves touched with gold. Stray dogs, pigs, and cats, the occasional peacock, and families of monkeys lived alongside the ironing man and vegetable sellers, kerbside t ..read more