Protean Magazine

In this gorgeous elegy for her “first no-hassle lover,” poet Joan Mazza reflects on desire as a mutual experiment, a test of “heat and pressure” unbound by marriage or monogamy.

Using declassified documents from the CIA’s MKUltra project, poet Patrick Blagrave explores the terrifying violence US imperialism wages upon its subjects.

In “Job Security,” poet Umang Kalra twists the language of work around the present apocalypse, asking: “what does it mean to name / the thing / that will kill / you?”

In “RE: UPCOMING ACTIONS **CHANGE OF PLANS**,” poet Tiffany Katz twists the unglamorous language of the email blast into an acidic critique of political complacency.

In this compact lyric, poet Shira Dentz reflects on the fundamental condition of capitalist modernity: “how things become people / & vice versa.”

Andrew Ketcham   The way his name suggests a wound. Ritualistic self mutilation. St. Sebastian. Penetration. Induced vomiting and martyrdom. Dentistry. Bleeding your mouth like nuclear pennies. How you roll it around. Sieve it between your teeth. Suck from it all tannins and meaning. Pierces your tendency to touch things you ought not. Fire cracker.…

Amid increasing state violence against workers and pueblos originarios in Peru, we present an excerpt from Peruvian poet Valeria Román Marroquín’s collection ANA C. BUENA (La Balanza Editorial, 2021), translated into English for the first time by Noah Mazer.

Poet Jake Romm’s “Lamentations” grieves the inadequacy of revolutionary poetry while maintaining the necessity of revolution: “A poem,” he writes, “is a failure / To fulfill the promise of poetry.”

Poet Kurt Ostrow’s “Minor Deities” infuses the nonhuman world with the spirit of emancipatory politics.