Columns
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Two Poems
Equations You make them up,the tiny alliancesbetween having kidsand having trees,between kidsin the trees andtheir handspainted intothe disappearingshape of light.You make theconnection betweena lot of hormonescoursing through you,a lot of chaos at the door.Between the fishgone limp and thechild in…
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Books that Made Me Gay: “The Vampire Lestat” by Anne Rice
Decades before Stephenie Meyer shook up high schools worldwide with her anemic, Mormon vampires and years before Buffy ever kissed Spike, Anne Rice, the spiritual godmother to each beautifully insane individual to ever post horny slash fic on AO3 and…
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The Sisters of Song, Myth, Poetry, Prayer: A Conversation with Maya Salameh
“I think the places in this book (especially Damascus and San Diego) are reconstituted in that they are mangled in my recitation of them, and I allow them their mangledness. By insisting on the presence of Arabic on the page,…
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A Reclaiming and a Reckoning: A Conversation with Diana Whitney
“So what do we do with the rage? We can make meaning from it. We can shape it into some form where it’s manageable, whether that’s a form on the page in a poem, whether it’s a story we can…
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On Natalie Shapero’s “Stay Dead”
In Shapero’s words, “everyone is a worker.” If many of life’s actions are performances done for payment, so that even oxygenation is “a service / the woods provide,” then art forms like acting, painting, and writing are also determined by…
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Invocation of the Black River
Melissa says squatting in the river is like squatting behinda restaurant. Or over the toilet of a rural restroomseveral hours into a road trip. This is a moment of restwhere I must engage my core muscles. I lookat Erin unswayed…
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The First Book: J Brooke
“The book was always meant as political in its simple existence— the adding my voice to the annals of Trans/Nonbinary collective is an act of anti-erasure. While writing this, though, the incoming administration became even more vile in its attempt…
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Pop-Tart Crumb
“All my life is telling obstacle from sweetness and i must smell to know – i smell everything for its scents – i smell rock most often – wet wood – i smell linoleum, hair of dog, smudge of olive…
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Now More than Ever, We Need “The Happiest Band on Earth”
It’s a sentiment at the core of The 502s’ origin story. In 2015, Isola and a pair of cousins founded the band, and while they were searching for a name, Isola and one of the cousins (who happened to live…
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Gendering Food and the Solidarity of Rituals: A Conversation with Alicia Kennedy
“Being rooted in my neighborhood has made my writing better because I listen to other people who aren’t on the internet. I listen to people who have very different perspectives on the world, and sometimes I hate people that I’m…
