What is our responsibility as artists to reinvent or reimagine our world, our selves, our work in order to dismantle current systems and conventions and tastes that are at best, dated and stifling, and at worst a threat to real, lived lives? What role does re-imagination play in freedom?
Sometimes the name and the body stop serving one another. It has been ineffective to always have to explain what this journal wasn’t (about JF, for instance) before we could say what we were. It is far too easy to distract oneself with the symptom instead of the problems rooted in the system at play.
Dear James, I wrote this all in cat memes cuz I didn’t want anything to get missed.
Dying towns are filled with ghosts
of the people who inhabit them, not celestial bodies.
But what are we to the moon, if not celestial?
Could we be heavenly?
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we both know what it means to shudder, pregnant
with delight at the blue veined banquet of belly, we
both kick husbands sprawling as we kneel between
their wives’ spread legs, agape with the slush of life
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Quickly, there are rides, all with men. It never takes more than a couple of minutes for someone to stop and I am zipping through Washington, then Oregon. One man picks me up in northern California. He’s just a few years older than me. There are empty soda cans rolling around the floor of his black Camaro. Maybe he will fall in love with me. Maybe he has a life I could join. Continue reading
A man who drinks between my long white columns/
tastes history: the first time I/ touched my breasts,/
then below, when I changed into an/ ocean from a dam—/
my belly a sculptor of people, fed by/ the milk-springs/
of my mountains. Continue reading
Phillipa didn’t seem like the sort of person who kept a seagull in the freezer. I was looking for ice at three in the morning when I found it, right behind the microwavable meals and fish sticks. Continue reading
He always insisted that barbeque was meant to be eaten with one’s hands—anything more and you were deemed a sham, just another half-assed pretender at life. Sweet Baby Ray’s served as blood while I was taught to pop bones from sockets, and like a fledgling under the wing of a hawk, I tore at things once living beneath my father’s cool shadow. Continue reading
Certainly doubt can be a refuge, especially when a ray of light is beyond my reach. Continue reading
Standing up from the bed and looking me over, he mutters. I giggle. “I don’t know Spanish.”
“I thought you were Dominican,” he says. There is a weird pause. “What are you?”
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Which country do you love more?
The question asked of each one of us
young travelers of the diaspora,
children with shiny shoes and English textbooks. Continue reading
I like the idea of editing for a publication that isn’t wedded to one style and is truly open to variation. There’s something fun and unexpected about picking work that won’t necessarily be paired with its close relatives. Continue reading
The James Franco Review 