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.
Our nonfiction editor for March/April is Ashley Ford, who does cool things at the Harnisch Foundation during the day. She’s a former staff writer at BuzzFeed.Com and a current serious yacht rock enthusiast. She’s also working on writing a book (or two), and co-editing the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. Born and raised in Indiana, … Continue reading
Our poetry editor for March/April is Michelle Peñaloza who grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. She is the author of two chapbooks: landscape/heartbreak (Two Sylvias Press, 2015) and Last Night I Dreamt of Volcanoes (forthcoming, Organic Weapon Arts, 2015). Her poetry can be found in The Asian American Literary Review, The New England Review, TriQuarterly, Pinwheel, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships, scholarships, and awards from the University of Oregon, Kundiman, Artist … Continue reading
Thirty Soul Mates Today we’ll likely witness the first Norton Poetry Lecture partially delivered by keytar. Quiz: considering prior recipients— (a) Eliot, (b) Hancock, (c) Cage, (d) Kentridge— who might’ve said, there are no wrong notes, just better choices? My point being, recent thinking on the state of the soul mate has been … Continue reading
Seaside Paul was on the couch, tuning my guitar. He doesn’t know how to tune a guitar, so he was just tightening the E-string. I had already told him to stop once. The string was making that high pitched crackling noise, then it snapped. So I slapped him across the face. For a moment, it … Continue reading
Io Metis Amalthea Io Volcanic stalagmite child covered in the blanket of eclipse, I can hear you. Jupiter storms waking your sisters held inside you. Siren sung. Shipwreck. We’ve seen these tropes before. When you settle, what birthed will seem familiar? This brilliant life spewing into the vacant cold of space. We now know it … Continue reading
Allure Song Allure 1. Suede Nude before the mirror, she scrutinizes her sapling legs and the ant-bite swell of breasts, searching for some allure there. She fingers the gold sequined thong, then steps into it the way she’d cross a low wall. Sliding into heels, she grasps her hips. Sashay, she thinks, sashay like the … Continue reading
Two Poems by Patrick Fontes Mi Primo’s Stain The Dust Blower’s Dream Mi Primo’s Stain Mi primo’s canvas painted body monochrome India ink on brown skin blurred scribble on his forearm faded into prison cell walls at juvie 1983 then Corcoran, Wasco, Tracy, Quentin “Damn primo, this is my second strike” he scoops more of … Continue reading
The Egg And I by Katie O’Reilly The baby’s body was long and slender, and supposedly he had my coloring. Just as I had twenty-six years prior, he came out bald and beet-red on a crisp, October day. But after he stabilized, a well-off married couple, both brown-haired barristers, took him home to their London flat. … Continue reading
Two poems by Kate Lebo Ladies, This is the Final Rose Forsythia Ladies, This is the Final Rose with help from ABC’s The Bachelor 1. To the one-armed girl on rollerskates he says You have no reason to be scared. She falls to prove her bravery. This is not the same thing as fear … Continue reading
Red Eye by Ahsan Butt Stuck. Laid over between the place I was born and the place I live. Four a.m. spent spacing out, stretching against a stiff seat, legs laid out on my Hilfiger bag. Denim man in the row behind me has never seen anything like me. Black greasy hair of … Continue reading
The James Franco Review 