Alrighty then. Time to tweet about @BarrenMagazine's new issue. THREAD TIME! Let's get it.

"Between them a silence more silent
than the feather-fall of a stuffed pigeon
perched on a picket fence."

@j_harriswrites's poem "What I Mean When I Say I am Sad" is a sonic masterpiece, the repetition of sounds creating an echo the poem's silence. A fantastic publisher's pick!

"When we tell kids to make-believe do we want them to imagine, explore the possibilities, or do we really mean, be exactly who you are, what you are?"

@LoebDavon's "O.J. and the Wax Museum" explores how this world calculates and shapes the perception and worth of black boys.

@LoebDavon's piece has so many layers, but I'm always so impressed by how Davon writes his readers right into his work, how I come away from his work examining my own complicity, how even as a black woman, I walk away checking and re-checking myself.

"What people did not understand—or did not want to accept—was that a man I’d once invited into my bed, willingly, could be, later, uninvited"

@suzannegrove's "A Family Death" is a piece that opens and reopens the wound of sexual assault, of being silenced.

@SuzanneGrove manages to reproduce the unshakable rage of being talked over, illustrates how some are willing to preserve the image of a loved one and cannot make space for error, for anyone else's pain or grief.

"I actually just got rid of my smoke alarms altogether since I have to straighten my hair every day. No fires yet."

@TeaFranco's "Up Next: I Dye My Hair Blonde" is a wonderful and humorous exploration of the time and labor we dedicate to our hair.

@TeaFranco takes me back to the distinct smell of hair burning, the tickle in the back of my throat from the smoke, the sizzle of the hot-comb as it passed through product. Such a sensory experience.

"And what do they know of my black grandmother,
who sat in her townhouse, 2 months pregnant
with her own black son, and watched
the smoke rise over DC after their white daddies
killed Martin Luther King."

@candyslam_'s "After Heather Quinn" is a stunner.

@candyslam_ this ENDING is everything; the pivot to the reality that a white author simply could not imagine because she did not live it.

"you hear
far in your home in Botswana where language is as silky as coffin cloth.
you don’t have to slice your skin and see mirrors"

@Kunmi_sher's "Geology School" transforms language the way one may change the shape of play-doh in the hand.

@Kunmi_sher plants an imagistic surprise at every turn of this poem. This poem is a different dimension, a magical landscape in which grief becomes a flower, in which god becomes falling leaves.

"I tell him I found the portrait.
He says, 'I’m not going to keep working
on it. I don’t like how you turned out.'"

@_andrewhahn's "Portrait of Late Morning" is like a dice; small and multifaceted. It packs so many emotions in such a small space.

@_andrewhahn shows the spectrum of feeling in a single shared moment; tenderness, shame, vulnerability, the tension that settles in the aftermath of a hard and uncomfortable truth.

"monks speaking to sparrows on the porch where we were all brothers / mom’s porch where her monks crossed their hearts & begged the heavens for gun laws"

@aliner's "My Mom & Her Monks" resides in this wonderful intersection of the spiritual and the worldly.

What I love about this piece by @aliner is how it unites us, shows that we are on the same team. That in our every day desires or even in our most intimate conversations with our higher powers, we are all wishing for the same things. For justice, for peace, for love.

"Whose belly to clutch when the jagged edges cut deep inside?

My aunties once scrubbed a chair for two hours after I bled on it."

@sabzi_k's "Questions for the Outward Curve of My Stomach" haunts us with questions about the body.

@sabzi_k reminds us that sometimes the body is both a question and a wound. We can never know what the body will gift us, or what it will take away.

"every neighbor at the tips of their

lawns yelling to the passing cars pumping their fists
pumping their signs in the air high as if

they thought God could read them from 16th Street"

@dpwpoetry's "16th Street Neighborhood Protest" is a rising and falling chorus.

@dpwpoetry captures the polyvocal space of protests, how everyone's rage and restlessness coalesces into one cry for justice and change. But the language also works to rework our ideas of protests. Our rage is music, a song that we will not stop playing until you listen.

FICTION SECTIONNNNN

"Ju Lin lifted a puzzle piece and dropped it into her steaming cup. She swirled it until it softened and bled colour. She scooped the limp shard in a pool of liquid and emptied the spoon at the back of her tongue."

@aishabhassan's "Eat Me" is delicious (every pun intended).

@aishabhassan perfectly captures the horror of being trapped within the mundane, the "picture perfect." The MC's small rebellion of finishing her husband's puzzles behind his back evolves into something more sinister, and becomes a symbol for what the MC really wants.

Just as the puzzle piece bleeds red in the cup of hot liquid, Ju Lin secretly hopes that her body will do the same, will get rid of what was "becoming a hard shape" inside. SO good! @aishabhassan

"After that, tossing those Cheeto bags in the trash felt wrong. They looked like trophies–shiny and golden and reflecting my little girl’s light."

@HenryPresente's "Every Last Piece" is a stunning emotional portrait of a parent and a child struggling with homelessness.

@HenryPresente illustrates how in the face of uncertainty, we clamor to hold on to any token of comfort or familiarity. How safety can come in the form of a Tide-doll, or the aluminum foil shine of empty Cheetos bags.

Finally, @HenryPresente leaves us thinking about optical illusions and perception, and reminds us that if we look at something at just the right angle, we may begin to see the good in it.

"If you remove the suffering slowly you don’t even notice the absence. If you replace it again slowly you don’t see."

@bethmarcel's "Good Screens" imagines a world in which people purposely look away from the bad and submit to the numbness of "happy screens."

@bethmarcel urges us not to give up on the first try when we're trying to see the truth, encourages us that if we look long enough, we can see past what higher powers want us to see.

This push from @bethmarcel is a timely reminder. It's not enough to keep our heads down in our own happy screens. Sometimes you have to open the blinds and squint a bit, take the time to find others who need out help, glinting with moonlight.

"'You’ll always have to worry about psychopaths,' she says.

'Not when I’m a grown-up woman,' I insist.

There is already regret on her face. She regrets the words as they come. 'Especially when you’re a grown-up woman.'"

Emily Mani's "The Teller" is such a gem.

Mani argues that the danger of womanhood doesn't begin when our bodies develop, when we are old enough to be considered symbols of sex. The danger of womanhood begins when we are still making salads out of grass, when our mothers can still carry us to bed.

Yet on the other side of fear, Mani leaves us with the power of a mother's touch and closeness. A mother's shush is always strong enough to erase the fear seeping from beneath the fridge, the fear that breathes in the darkness of our rooms.

Okay guys! I'm gonna stop here and take a break for the night (I didn't even realize I'd been tweeting for over 5 hours!) Tomorrow I'm gonna hit the nonfiction and photography sections and live tweet my favorites from those!

Alright beautiful people I'm BACK! Today I'm gonna live tweet some of my fav pieces from the nonfiction and fiction sections, and will probably rave about some of the photos because the photography in this issue was to DIE FOR. Let's get to it.

"Of course, the ice replies. Replies the lake. Replies a voice I know. All else is silent, save the sweep of easy wind and downy flake before the vision vanishes."

@MehPoeting's "Between the Woods and Frozen Lake" is a portrait of the ways that we exist on the edge of breaking.

Just like the thick ice over the lake has its breaking point, @MehPoeting reminds us that so does everyone else; just like Katherine who no one believed, who like cracked and became a "monster" under too much weight.

More than anything, @MehPoeting's writing effortless exists in multiple places at once (in the realm of navigating a relationship, of experiencing microaggressions, of trying to understand others), and he still manages to drop us where they all connect.

"We are living in the uncanny valley, the gap between what we know to be real and a flawed approximation of reality. What has this extended isolation done to us?"

@GraceLP's "We Are Living in the Uncanny Valley" both poses and answers this haunting question.

@GraceLP beautifully captures the "in-between" of pandemic life, how there is a kind of intimacy fostered as we try to survive together, and how that intimacy is also offset by the reality that we are the greatest danger to one another.

So how then do we get through the "uncanny valley"? According to @GraceLP, we hide hope away for the darker days. We dare to imagine a better time. We have the audacity to find small joys, to pluck the blackberries when they ripen and enjoy their sweetness.

"I wanted to say I’m sorry as I stood in the doorway and watched you disappear around the corner. I couldn’t say why I did that except to remember the last place I saw you before I never saw you again."

Darius Stewart's "Whiteboys" left me speechless.

Stewart took me on a quest for acceptance, love, and tenderness. From the first encounter with a man who urged the speaker to "keep it a secret," to the last with a man who was in love with someone else, the speaker always finds the urge to apologize waiting on the tongue.

More than anything, Stewart's piece was a heartbreaking reminder of the ways we blame ourselves for not being loved, how the emptiness inside of us leaves us waiting in the doorway for a body that we know doesn't want to keep us warm.

"I wanted so desperately to purge myself of grief, like a virus to be expelled or a tumor to be excised, but grief doesn’t function like that. It is not apart from you, but rather an eternal part of you."

@mtoddcohen's "Clasping Hands" has me openly weeping on a Sunday morning.

@mtoddcohen shows us what it means to start again, to continue to shoulder the door grief puts up until it breaks. There is so much honesty here, a reminder that grief is a shape shifter, and that the path through grief is uncertain but not impossible.

Grief does not disappear, but @mtoddcohen helped me to remember that grief is not always an unpleasant guest in the home. Eventually, it will soften into something more familiar, it will move in, and we learn how to live with it.

"I realized that my father would die soon, and that he and my mother both knew this, and understood that it was time, not to reconcile, but to reconcile their differences."

@kimmagowan's "Irreconcilable Differences" REALLY hit home for me.

@kimmagowan piece does this difficult work of exploring how we may our parents through a different lens as we mature, how we may come to understand the decisions our parents make in a different light as adults.

@kimmagowan urges us to remember that our parents are flawed humans who hurt, who cause harm, who have moments of redemption. As someone who's parents are going through a nasty divorce, the ending gutted me. I hope that my parents can share that moment of reconciling differences.

"There is something eerie about emptiness. First, it loosens your rib cage and pumps your heart full of air. Then when your heart has eaten enough void, it climbs in and occupies all space."

@Duunsin's "Love Does Not Choose Me" perfectly captures the realm of dating/singlehood.

@Duunsin does not shy away from the pressures that women endure from loved ones to "settle." We are told that our expectations are too high, that we are asking for too much. And yet Oluwadunsin pushes back on the idea that we must give up our fantasies.

Perhaps my favorite thing about this piece is how @Duunsin openly acknowledges the downfalls of being alone. And yet the emptiness is not enough for the speaker to stop holding out hope for the man of their dreams. This piece says, "Just wait. Just hold on."

Okay! Done with nonfiction, on to fiction!

"On the way the car drifts and the tire scrapes curb and it jolts her like she’s waking up and the baby’s name falls out of her mouth. Flies out, startled, like a bird in a magic trick."

@chelsea_l_w's "The Baby Down There" has one of the strongest voices I've read in a while.

I'm in love with the way @chelsea_l_w juxtaposes the matter-of-fact (even cheeky) tone of the narrator with the heaviness of loss and grief. There is a perfect balance of levity and darkness, just enough to turn our heads away from the painful truth before it's too much to bear.

"We stay like that for a while, like the cowboys in the Westerns you watch—sweat dripping from our foreheads, a steely stare down in the saloon, right before we pull our guns.

Maybe this is how it is in Texas."

@alexadarkmusic's "Heat" is so so good.

@alexadarkmusic takes what initially seems like a frivolous fight between two siblings and distills it down to the pain of losing a mother to death and the pain of losing a father to grief.

@alexadarkmusic does one of my favorite things; she takes a moment in time and cracks it open like an egg, lets all of the mess spill out and make something good.

"I try to isolate the direction of the cicada’s fading call, weakened by the cooler air, by hunger, by loneliness. I fall into a restless dream where I am the cicada: trapped in this tin van, my calls unanswered."

@JoVarnish1's "Santiago" was an immediate favorite of mine.

@JoVarnish1 takes a magnifying glass and puts it up to the little things that bother is only to see that these little things are only symptoms are a larger breach beneath the surface.

I'm so struck by how real @JoVarnish1's characters feel, how they are allowed to feel frustrated with one another, how they are given room to be a little irrational and impatient, and how we readily forgive them when the root of their pain is revealed to us.

Finally, I want to highlight some of my favorite sets of photos from this issue!

"Telling Silences" by @MartinsDeep1 is out of this world. These photos are so intimate, so pregnant with feeling.

"Paris at the Height of COVID-19" by Grant Yun is haunting and beautiful. While

the lack of people in the photos is unsettling, these pictures also remind us of how the beauty of nature shines when it is unsullied by human intervention.

"Searching for Better Times" by Rick Lingo made me long for places I've never been, made me ache for a world saturated in

more color.

"Pandemic Landscapes" by @kip_knott exists right on the line between the beautiful and the terrifying. This emptiness is something out of a horror movie, and yet there is something peaceful in the rows and rows of nothingness.

And that will officially end my live tweet of the AMAZING @BarrenMagazine issue! I'm so sorry if my flood of tweets was a lot, but I really want to start giving back by doing things like this more often. I'm also sorry if I didn't tweet about your piece!

There were so many, and they were all so wonderful. But I just wanted to show some love to the issue and to a ton of the wonderful contributors in it! I hope you guys enjoyed this. I'll be doing live threads for @VerseZine and @SPOONFEEDmag next!