I gazed at the home, a lighthouse among the static, muted surroundings. I prudently adjusted my hat and rehearsed in my head exactly what I would have to recite to the ingenuous Gilbert family when and if I saw them. As I limped to the door, I felt my stomach retch with uneasiness and heave with discomfort.[…]
My art naturally is informed by an education in art history and an experience in a gallery that specialized in old master prints and drawings and antiquarian books. Having been drawn initially to the art of woodcut by exposure, through books and museums, to the works of early 20th century masters, I have been a practitioner of the medium of woodcut since I was sixteen years old.[…]
Sasha Louis Bush’s ongoing series Rock, Paper, Scissors, uses elementary school classrooms in New York City as a shared creative space, serving both children and adults.[…]
Navigating the world with PTS and depression often renders me paralyzed; stuck in a place between grief and acceptance; speechless. Through art, there is a negotiation in meaning and understanding. Often unspoken.[…]
When I was a little girl, I climbed into my mother’s bed in the early mornings and snuggled up against her back. I remember feeling such a desperate love for her and also how that love was tinged with fear and sadness, as if she were somehow an evanescent, non-renewable resource.
Disability as entertainment. For entertainment purposes only. For compelling narratives. We give to telethons and walkathons and passionate speechification to keep all disease away… like throwing virgins or dogs—sometimes entire cities—into or under volcanoes to appease the gods.[…]
I certainly see an awakening of sorts right now. In this moment in particular I see it on the part of people of color in publishing, who I think have been marginalized for a very long time and are gaining confidence to speak up and are seeing openings for that. Maybe this moment will open up some doors, but I think it’s going to be painful for some people to address those realities. I welcome it.[…]
I could feel the rubbery, nimble necks of the dead pheasants underneath my fingertips as I carried them to the sink to be plucked and gutted. My grip on their bodies was loose, making it easy to drop them quickly. I wanted to drop them, but I resisted.
Now I understand why others stayed silent while being dragged. They were thinking about the life that they had lived, as I was doing now. But what I couldn’t understand was why I hadn’t lived. How could I have wasted my life doing things I hate to train for an assessment that I was going to fail anyway?[…]
In my first year of teaching, an entire family came to meet me at our school’s first parent night: mother, father, daughter, and son. They were strikingly tall, both mom and dad my height, and the daughter swiftly approaching. The Samsons (names changed) dressed as if they might be headed to church, or coming from […]
Yan An’s poems are highly experimental, unconventional, and unique according to the standards and traditions of Chinese culture, considering their aesthetic value, contents, philosophical denotations, and meanings. As a pioneer in modern westernized Chinese poetry, Yan An has completely transformed Chinese readers’ concepts and understanding of poetry through his unique views about the universe, life, society, and people.[…]
Many years ago, when cops rarely arrested teenagers for trespassing in vacant buildings, I went ghost hunting with my forever friends, Marney and Janine. Our target was a building in an abandoned arsenal not far out of town. It was a moonless, windy night, perfect for a bit of misbehavior and mischief.
Every time I take the 7 Train, relaxing beside the wall, I notice the lineaments of each building with indented violet windows. I enjoy listening to the accompanying passengers’ music. I’m aware of how utopic our sky is. I’m aware of it all.
History is a border mining town where the immigrant citizen workers were loaded and deported on trains across the line and none of the high school history teachers know about the Bisbee Deportation. None of the history teachers teach the Bisbee Deportation names crushed into dark shafts banished on ghost trains. History knows about systemic indifference and the looting of voices.
The government is researching what your fave ‘spiritual guru’ on instagram has been trying to sell you? And the CIA studied this in the eighties?!
This is not surgery, but delicate massage, feeling the flour fall into thickening milk, caving into the mix from the sides, birthing like a glacier into that fabulous muck hole, oozing between her fingers as she delicately mixes a quicksand of sorts, widening its territory until the feel is just right. Not too much, not too little.
A few years ago, I worked with a girl who said she ate ramen noodles in college so she didn’t have to ask her parents for money. “I struggled too,” she said, and I wanted to scream at her because what she failed to realize was that her parents had money to lend her.
When you cry, you stare at yourself with more love than you know what to do with. You wish your lashes always looked that dark and your eyes always looked that bright and your cheeks always looked that red and beautiful, spreading life-giving heat against your pale, glowing skin. You feel yourself splitting in two.[…]
but I fell in love over the phone in 1989, his name two low notes shoved out my throat, repeated like a gulf smacking shore rocks in starlight, our letters tucked between issues of Uncanny X-Men because I did not want a willow switch across my back
I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately. Not from a macabre fascination, but more because we’ve been confronted with it on a daily basis thanks to the COVID pandemic.
The hijab had made her feel blessed when she had first been allowed to put it on. She thought she was praising Allah. She knew she was pleasing her father. He had looked at her in a different way that day.[…]
Thanks for posting me. At least you know someone (probably) read the headline. Maybe they even read the first few lines of text that appear beneath the thumbnail image, or the pull quotes. […]
It was no coincidence that God created Adam first Because Women cannot be molded without there First being a man To create them To tempt them To crave them To devour them Adam’s ribs Were not given to Eve’s bosom Because of his generosity Were they? […]
This was different. This was x-rays, exams, and endless procedures. Like everything in this god-forsaken land, her body seemed to be drying up beneath the unrelenting sun.[…]
Perhaps nothing provides as much fulfillment in life as finding and sustaining a successful love relationship and pursuing what you believe you were meant to do. For me this happened simultaneously; it all began with re-finding myself, or what I call becoming real.
The women from my mother’s generation would have held their hands to their cheeks in shock and dismay. They would have cursed me for acting like a widow when I was fortunate to have a husband, alive and well! They would have whispered darkly about me, the irresponsible married woman who wore the symbol of widowhood so blithely![…]
My husband called my name. He usually calls me “Honey” or “Baby” or “Hey, You,” but this time, he used my given name. I felt an unexpected wave of anger wash over me, and I stomped into the living room to confront him. “Don’t call me Karen!”
She doesn’t feel my moist hands trail up her chin, up to the wings of her eyes tracing the buttery suns—of my bloated body keeping me afloat.[…]
I think of Korean immigrant writers who lived longer in the United States than I have, writers who wanted to share their stories but died without doing so. And others who did, wrote in Korean and were not translated. Their immigrant experiences are different from mine. That is why I feel compelled to write and share stories on behalf of those voiceless, invisible, powerless women.[…]
A literary and art journal
from the MFA community at
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