Carnage, chaos, cuddling. This month’s artist interview is with Ben Herbert. Ben combines sculpture, collage, and photography to create a world all his own. One that involves pup-play, a burning landscape, and exploration of the human body. How would you describe yourself as an artist? Ben: I would describe myself as an artist, photographer, and […]
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It was that time of the year in my city. Thunderstorm. Heavy rainfall. Violent winds. Blackout. While it brings inconvenience to most, for me, it happens to be the best time of the year. Nothing to distract me from reading. No Internet, no Netflix, no one to ask me for tea making favours and no […]
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I bought a fishing boat and sprinkled twelve life jackets around the deck. On the day of the tour, I wore a durian-patterned shirt with the Singapore Tourism Board logo on the breast pocket. Aaron, a bearded teenager with poop emoji earrings, shoved fifty dollars at me without asking for my license. “I study ancient […]
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once I was a fawn dipped in holy water.the forest my haven. the trees my family.the flowers my communion. the mist myprayer circle. the creek my rosary. the leaves whispering a promise of heaven. but only if I grew to be the kind of doe the forest wanted. all speckled with beguile and tame and meek. the kind who […]
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35mm the next time i take you to my parents’ house it’s better we leave the catholics out of it and i am at least three quarters of a person mom cooks & cooks hot chicken wings & honey garlic my sister’s favourite a […]
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Nancy Huang grew up in America and China. She is a Sewanee, VONA, Tin House, Watering Hole, and Pink Door fellow. Her debut poetry collection, Favorite Daughter, is out by Write Bloody Publishing. Her poetry, plays, and prose are published by The Offing, Cosmonauts Avenue, poets.org, The Margins, and film distribution company A24. She has […]
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& the other night you held a tree outside my apartment & you said it was perhaps the most huggable tree ever & my phone said it was an apple tree but i didn’t see any apples & tonight i am holding the same tree & it really is a good tree & it is […]
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How to Adjust to the Dark, a new novella by writer and editor Rebecca van Laer, begins in arather straightforward manner. In the first few pages, our narrator, Charlotte, explains themotivation behind the pages in front of us. After a long hiatus from writing, she has remainedunsure of what to do with her poetry, until […]
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Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators La Movida by Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta: Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta croons in the voice of a lovesick teenaged folklorist time traveler about revolution, housework, anti-colonialism, folk tales, post-punk, anti-fascism, anorexia, and alcoholism. Named both for the Chicana feminist concepts of revolutionary maneuvers and submerged technologies of struggle and the explosive […]
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Baest Journal: “a journal of queer forms & affects … all forms of submissions are welcome, including poetry, essays, reviews, (non)fictions, soundscapes, appendages of new media, monsters that could be called ‘theories,’ archives, past-and-present times, meanderings, hybrid beings, artistries, creations, excretions, hypnagogic ramblings, & whatever else seems fit to email to baestjournal@gmail.com.” No deadline. No fee. […]
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Birds dive for fish, backdropped by pinkhaze. I watch them disregard breaking wavesand sink shamelessly for what they want. Watermelon, two eggs, five dates. I runmy daily list of what I ate. A net negative,I decide. I roll over onto my stomach, eye-level with the sand. Crabs dartbetween holes. So tentative, they scareat the tapping […]
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yesterday, while lugging a box up the stairsto my new apartment, lungs aching in thestink of a hundred cracked and rotting pears soupy with august under their mother, green and sweetness-heavy. it once would’ve conjuredan image of us, older, in a perfect little domesticcountryside life somewhere, called to mind the songs about dizzying and soft love i collected […]
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I. My eyes have eyes and their eyes follow me everywhere. My shadow has a shadow, no matter how small and green. I have never been afraid to slip into the crowd inside a crowd, lose myself in between the teeming rush of people’s coats. To teeter on the edge of a platform to a platform just to feel the […]
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i smelled jasmine today – cut my lungs wide open. and yesterday, i swear, it was fresh pears on the tree outside my windowmonths too soon. i thought of the way they filled the basketon my bicycle as it leanedagainst the stairs. deflated tires and theache of uneaten fruit. i don’t know where i’ll be when they come again […]
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●●●● preposterous ●●●● how intense grief ●●●● reminds you of ●●●● games it is not: ●● pac-man, ●●● galaga, ●●●● major havoc ●●●● embarrassing ●●●● there is a face ●●●● to which grief cleaves: ● mouth, ● blip, ● gulf, ● whir, ●●●● inaccurate ●●●● the glitching face ●●●● I fight to piece: ● zip, ● clasp, ● jolt, ● wrench, ● twine, ●●●●●●●●●● shouldn’t have opened my windows to you ●●●●●●●●●● should’ve known pain pooled is more […]
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diaCRITICS: “diaCRITICShighlights art, literature, and stories from writers, artists, and culture-makers of the Vietnamese and Southeast Asian diaspora, on and from all shores … Our mission is to represent Vietnamese and Southeast Asian diasporic literature, art, and culture … We publish essays, reviews, creative writing, and profiles and interviews with culture makers. We publish primarily in […]
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Highlighting recently released works by marginalized creators THE LOST CONVERSATION: Interviews with an Enduring Avant-Garde by Sara Farrington“In this collection of interviews conducted between 2019-2021 with New York theater artists who have spent their lives working in and inventing the avant-garde, playwright Sara Farrington brings to light a series of “lost conversations” about class, race, […]
Read moreBeing her family history’s archivist while weaving a story of her own, Thương Hoài Trần (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, IL. Combining their training in printmaking with newfound skills in fibers, she documents a familial immigrant story told to them through word-of-mouth and old photographs. How would you introduce yourself as an […]
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The red and purple lights that seep into the windows from the carwash infuses the atmosphere with a tantalizing tone, one that I am all too familiar with at this point in my life. Like any other 17-year-old high school junior, I am wired. I am antsy. I am using this opportunity as a mission […]
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pistachio milk a refrigerator in which to store the pistachio milk floorboards upon which to set the refrigerator in which to store the pistachio milk kitchen walls that house the floorboards upon which to set the refrigerator in which to store the pistachio milk apartment ceiling to support the kitchen walls that house the floorboards […]
Read moreHighlighting recently released works by marginalized creators Aerial Concave Without Cloud by Sueyeun Juliette Lee “Aerial Concave Without Cloud is a collection of poetry steeped in the bluest apocalypse light of solar collapse and the pale, ghostly light of personal devastation and grief. Through a combination of academic research and the salp’uri dance form, Sueyeun Juliette […]
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Mahalia Sobhani (she/her) is a barista and social work student in southeastern Wisconsin. She is the oldest of ten and has a Pisces moon, which explains a lot. Her work can also be found in Catatonic Daughters and the Oakland Arts Review as well as the forthcoming Bonemilk anthology from Gutslut Press. You can find […]
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Miriam Saperstein is an artist, ritual-crafter and logistics maven based in Detroit, and soonmoving to Philly. Their writing and art have appeared in ctrl + v, Jewish Currents, thelickety~split, Pollux Journal, New Voices Magazine, and PROTOCOLS. You can find theirzines at miriamsaperstein.gumroad.com.
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Beestung Special issue: TRANS IS THE FUTURE. THE FUTURE IS TRANS.: “For this special issue of beestung, we’re seeking works by nonbinary and two-spirit writers that cross not only gender but also genre and form. We want your barely-legible; your not-fiction, not-poetry, and definitely-not-binary words. We want speculative work that can only do what it does […]
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no repeats or hesitation.i go first, ‘cause you’re the worst. category is: taste. in my dreams, you taste like stale lemon drops.overripe blueberries splitting down chin, tension wrought between us like a knifeslicing into the flesh of a peach. i cradle the pitin my cheek. dalgona kind of lethargic,seaweed-around-rice kind of unraveling, and so […]
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Britt DiBartolo is a poet living in western North Carolina. She recently graduated with herMaster’s in English literature from the University of Tennessee and now teaches research andwriting to high schoolers. Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in the Rising Phoenix Review,Pigeon Parade Quarterly, and elsewhere. She’s @frangipansy on Instagram.
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There is something special about seeing an artist create a self-portrait. Through a self-portrait you can analyze what an artist finds valuable, what they overlook, and how they wish to be perceived by their audience. For this month’s issue, I interviewed Jordan Ismaiel Ramsey (they/them), an artist committed to self-portraiture as a form of self-reliance. […]
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I only knew her for one night. She was performing a show where she screamed for two hours uninterrupted without a single variation in pitch. I had no plans for the evening. Over a Sazerac, the hotel bartender told me he’d won a ticket in a raffle for donating plasma and her performance had been […]
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Tacos de cabeza Beef head tacos. The love of your life. Only available in the morning. You have been eating tacos de cabeza since you were in your mother’s belly. You were born with tiny head tacos’ grease on your nose. There is a puestecito near the mercado in Obregón, Sonora. They were a few […]
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2022 Open Mouth Retreat: “an entire weekend full of community-building, generative writing workshops, and conversations between faculty members and small groups of participants. The Retreat fosters a welcoming space for poets to dive deeper into writing and generate new, challenging work … with faculty Alison C. Rollins and Paul Tran, hosted virtually June 10-12.” “The cost […]
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Highlighting recently released works by marginalized creators Beast at Every Threshold by Natalie WeeDescription from Arsenal Pulp Press: An unflinching shapeshifter, Beast at Every Threshold dances between familial hauntings and cultural histories, intimate hungers and broader griefs. Memories become malleable, pop culture provides a backdrop to glittery queer love, and folklore speaks back as a […]
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pause obsess rewind porn star Calvin Bankskneeling leaning back his hips bounce like a buoycaught in a tidal waveof cock muscle curls oh Calvinwhen you study your reflection do you worship the striationsin your chest? absthat cut & pushthrough the amniotic sac of your […]
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I’m just calling you to ask if you have ever scrunchedthe skin under your eyes and made wrinkles in the mirror and felt like you were seeing time? And when you let your eye skinfall back into place, was it like reversing time, like time travel, like being close to The impossible? I’m leaving you […]
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wai po falls sick in penang. through her cracked lips she still calls it pulau pinang,a palate bad-breathed, wu wei-harmonied to her language, the estuaries she carries in the seat of her spine pulau for island, for mooned blisters, volcano soresthere is a rhythm to dying bodies. when she bleeds, each scab sculpts a fragile […]
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Artist, spider sculptor, Louise Bourgeois said, “You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.” I remember the last time I spoke to Catherine Lacey in person was at a New Year’s Eve party in Chicago, December 31, 2019. We ate lasagna. The world was different then. […]
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This month’s spotlighted artist is Malí Bilstad (they/them). Currently finishing up their degrees in Illustration and Theater at Iowa State University, Malí is an illustrator creating their own tales of childhood fantasy. By doing this they hope to create worlds that their audience can escape reality from and find themselves in. Who are you as […]
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In high summer, I see lovemost clearly when I’m alone. “Shouldn’t a poet be more romantic?”someone asks me. I ask my heartif it ever thinks of me. This morning, I had breakfast by myselfat the hotel and listened to the lobby pianist. Tourists arrive early to Black Tortoise Park andI thought I saw a couple […]
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When I was four years old and learning to read, my born-again Christian grandfather gifted me a children’s bible. I was unimpressed by this offering because I couldn’t read but the illustrations remain in my mind thirty-five years later, especially the ones involving the gory demise of Jesus at the end of the book. “Who […]
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The neighbours all thought we were con artists. Maybe they were right. We met while waiting to view the apartment and pretended to be sisters to charm the landlord. It was never about influence. It was only about shelter. We just wanted to escape the heat. The ruse was instantly believable, even to us. Our […]
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I let my fingers lie on my bodylike my fingers are a sack of wooden stamps: delicate and foreign and someone else’s.I let my body lie under my fingers like my body is a field of tidepools:jagged, and damp, and a home to many things. I do this over and over: each objectbecoming another object. […]
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a pattern emerging not of need but desperation. nothing new, not even unknown. we dig up the truths just to bury them again. we endure the pain of looking until we have to look away. the pain of staying until we have to go. of being gone until we must return. endless, these cycles, these […]
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it’s 2019 so my New Year’s resolution is to only makedecisions on my period. in March it comes hard and fast, twice. all the bills still get paid, the countertopswiped down. i started eating again and now i can’t seem to rid myself of this hunger. i’ve decided i don’t want my life to be […]
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You remind me ofScene from the Great Flood (1826) by Joseph-Désiré CourtFour pairs of handsTerrified, alarmed, hystericalClutching, gasping, yearning No, not youI remind me of this paintingIn your presenceI become the hands Khushi holds a Bachelors in English literature from the University of Delhi, India, and iscurrently pursuing a Masters in Classics from Trinity College, […]
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Game Over Books — “Founded in 2017, Game Over Books is a small Boston-based press run by nerdy artists. Our mission? Print books from diverse voices that push creative writing forward into the Next Level. From acceptance to publication, we give continual guidance to writers as they continue to gain experience points, grow their craft, […]
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It is unfortunate that in certain circles, diaspora poetry has become a bit of a meme. It is also unfortunately easy to see why; while some charges against the genre seem downright mean (that it is disrespectful to launder familial trauma as art; that the constant invocation of a flattened, romanticized homeland is its own […]
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Tackling issues with post-grad life adjustment, work anxiety, and impulse purchases, Amy Chu (@camoot.journal) gives her viewers a multi-faceted look at modern day adult obstacles and the escapism she finds through imagination and art. A recent grad of SMFA Tufts in Boston, Amy’s work showcases her interest in vulnerability and storytelling while taking inspiration from […]
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My family has the luck of a penniless black cat at a high-stakes casino. When I was twelve, my mother, my father, and my older brother Jeffrey took a vacation to Hawaii. Jeffrey went surfing in the deep, blue ocean while I stayed ashore and observed jittery sand crabs as they popped in and out […]
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I pace the house looking for the dog, the ghost of the dog, the ghost of someone. The mother and dynasty and mausoleum I carry inside me. Something. It feels here but not, a muted anticipation, a phantom limb, when you brush the wall in the dark to hit the light switch you’ve struck a […]
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Something happened& somethingis going to happen & I don’t careabout any of that action.Emily is naked & breathing slowlybeneath the coversof this morning & really, I don’t carethat she’s naked, either.She’s breathing & I’m breathing& any weather wouldhold us together. Darren C. Demaree is the author of sixteen poetry collections, most recently “a child walks […]
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if you have everbeen an outsider at school, thought that college was cruel, isolated yourself to keep troubleat bay, depended on a bottle of Old Monk to wash loneliness away, read Maya Angelouand still ended at the therapist’s twice a week, lived from weekend to weekend till the yearwas out of reach, made out with […]
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VAGABOND CITY 