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.
It probably won’t sound like it, but this is a love story. It starts during Christmas in 1985 at Birchwood, a long-term inpatient institution for people with what was broadly termed mental health disorders. Continue reading
Stillwater, MN. we ripped stockings into veils for a bruise wrapped lace around each finger, counting glitters painting one another gold in sweet roughness. every first Monday we would explore caverns behind the attic shelf, read spells off music sheets sweep dust into sculptures and write them into song. and when the Midwest … Continue reading
You’ve told yourself that your emotions are a burden on your family, your friends, and later, your lovers. You worry about how everyone else feels in response to what lies in your heart and choose to ignore what hurts you. What you feel just isn’t worth talking about. Continue reading
Your name never seemed like it belonged to you. It sounded ridiculous when you said it out loud. It came from your mother, who wanted a bit of greatness, so she named you after Benito Juárez. Continue reading
untitled a handwritten sympathy card, delivered to her front door. her slender hands are flaky because the sadness has aged her, not the years. the phrase “she will never be the same” is crude, but she has no desire to break the surface. she’d rather take a knife to her own brain, creating bite-sized pieces of the torment, especially for us to taste. … Continue reading
Daddy speaks with pride that I am the first lawyer in the family and with relief that I am not the drug-addicted lost soul of his fears. Continue reading
You found me with a whale stoned & poisoned
in my stomach & stars had crusted my eyes for days.
Continue reading
1. The problem is all inside your head, others will say this.
2.But the problem lingers in your wrinkled bedsheets.
Continue reading
Criminal “Love is never better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe.” —Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye The winter I move back to my hometown—, degree-bearing, jobless, staying at mom’s—I’m remembering why … Continue reading
Have you ever not been listened to? Here, take a moment and remember a specific instance. Where did you feel it in your body? Continue reading
The James Franco Review 