a sex thinktank
by AB
Imagine you’re a lesbian, at a lesbian bar on Lesbian Night. You strike up a conversation with a total babe. You buy her a drink. She’s leaning in, touching your arm, giving you the eye. You take her out onto the dance floor and start mackin’. As the night winds down, you ask for her number. She giggles self-consciously.
“Oh, um…so, I’m not really a lesbian. I just think women are beautiful, and like, I thought it would be fun to hook up a little, or something.”Continue Reading
If I trace the lines of your palm
with only the tip
January 20, 2017 Issue
On this Inauguration Day, we are raising our voices for justice, equality, diversity, unity and empathy.
Essays
Mariam Williams “Radical Self-love: Writing Intimate Spaces in the Trump Era”
Loie Merritt “in the orchard of unmentionable”
Alysia Sawchyn “Feeling the World Askew”
Courtney Udischas “Un-President-Ed: The Trauma of Trump”
Eric Mueller “On Dick: How Materialism Caught Up with My Queer Life”
Caitlin Scarano “Tell Me How to Be”
Rose Heredia “No Time for Apathy: Processing the 2016 Election”
Poetry
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal “BALLOT BALLET BULLOT BULLET”
Jessica Lawson “Oath of Softest”
Torrin Greathouse “Body/Language”
Fiction
Erin Armstrong “A Southern Mythology: Tales from Georgia”
Interview
with Jennifer Williams, creator of “The Better Feminism Workbook”
IMAGE: Shepard Fairey, www.theamplifierfoundation.org
by Alysia Sawchyn
I pulled into the row of parking spaces at 6:25pm on a Saturday night, already five minutes late to the monthly prayer meeting at Our Lady of Clearwater. Looking up at the glass-paned building, the stone grottos encasing plaster statues of Jesus and Mary on either side of its main entrance, like guardian lions, I took one deep breath in and let it go slowly.Continue Reading
By Mariam Williams
For two weeks after the election, I wrote nothing. I was enrolled in two writing workshops for my MFA, and I wrote nothing. I submitted a poem I had written over the summer and didn’t bother to revise for my poetry workshop that week. The following week, I skipped my nonfiction workshop all together. I also doubled my regular dosage of anti-depressants and avoided all the people I can’t stand on even my best days.
On November 9th, I opened up Instagram and my writers group pages on Facebook and found people touting Morrison, Baldwin, Hughes.Continue Reading
by Caitlin Scarano
Author’s Note: Starting the night of the 2016 Presidential Election, I started a log on my computer that I maintained for ten days. I attempted to trace my reactions to Donald Trump’s victory, while recording other losses that were happening in my life at the time. This essay is shaped from those notes with some revisions and additions.
0.
The night of the election, I am all body.
Later, my mother will say: My whole body is numb with an unbearable sense of grief. Later, Josh will write me: I felt it in my spine.Continue Reading
by loie merritt
11/22/2016
It’s been two weeks since I’ve sat down to write. Everything is just misspelled words knocking against silent sobs in my ribcage. I can’t remember the way I felt before, the safety locked in, like both feet happily grounded in a block of cement, heat conducted and hardened with my own privilege. At the same time, nothing has changed. Day to day, feeding to feeding, broken dish to shitty diaper, my children requiring me to hold my own shit together. But in silence, I hear a clock ticking. And we don’t own a ticking clock. On this rare rainy day, I am thankful that I don’t have to go outside, into the world, the world that is the same except cut open. Do you feel that pain? What does the pain sound like today?Continue Reading
Jennifer Williams is a writer, musician and community organizer living in Oakland, California and has self-published two workbooks titled The Process of Letting Yourself Have a Creative Process and The Better Feminism Workbook. We chatted with Jennifer about The Better Feminism Workbook, finding strength in the era of Trump, and more.
body/language
my lover speaks in signs / fractals
hands into language when their voice fails them
i too know language / in the failures
of my body / split syntax of fractured chestContinue Reading
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