Immigration, assimilation, and trying to make it in a country – especially one where the primary language is nothing like your native tongue – can be traumatizing. But I had suspicions that there were other reasons for all the trauma.
Obviously, there’d been the Korean War where a ghastly three to four million people had been killed, and before that the callous Japanese occupation, but what exactly had taken place during these events?
The Opposite of Sorry by Gabe Montesanti
Not long before I started doing drag, I asked my friend Sai to teach me how to bind. “Sorry,” I said. “I know you’re busy. I just think I need your help.”
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Can Chimera Be Rescued? by Kristin Emanuel
Forget the original myth, its violence, its finality, your own complicity. What if--instead of dominion--this could be about tenderness?
Read MorePulp Poem by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer
Mirror, mirror on the wall / Look down in mercy / The wheel is fixed / In a lonely place
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Pregnancy, Art, and Censorship by Sarah Dalton
To the best of my knowledge, unless you include women’s private photo albums or personal social media feeds, there is no Madonna with Gestational Diabetes, Madonna of the Amniocentesis, or Madonna of the IV Tower and Labor and Delivery Room. I feel kinship with these images that portray the complexities of being pregnant. They challenge the demands for silence and censorship around experiences that do not follow the prescribed, imposed narrative of a joyful and celebratory pregnancy. These images revolve around loss, distress, powerlessness, a beauty often called grotesque, and, despite all its astonishing advances, a medical system that sometimes leaves more questions than answers.
Read MorePOSTCARDS by Lee Campbell
Royal Pine by Travis Dahlke
Davis is like an actor who saw their scalp on-screen and paid to get hair plugs only for the show to be canceled before its second season ever got to air.
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Just So by Nance Van Winckel
Just so, for a decade or two, the family before the TV had watched one life as they waited for another. Meanwhile sputterings flew every way from both.
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The Extravagant Art of Seeing: Thoughts While Tearing Up a Novel Late One Night (CHAPTER 30) by Ben Miller
Soon enough, living in a house that did not connect on any real level with the surrounding community--its assumptions, laws, and dialogues--I figured the best way to exist in a fragmented reality and abide by its dissonance was to make myself a fragment, a live sliver of what I might otherwise have been physically, spiritually, mentally or intellectually, a job I had done well by age fifteen...
Read MoreSelf-Portrait, Fourteen Miles and Twenty-Three Minutes from the Interstate by Daniel Garcia
Of time, there’s this: the pink stripes around the neck in the mirror after, which was the most surprising—as if to mimic the sky was as simple as pulling its color into one’s cheeks.
Read MoreMemory/Movie by Jason Sepac
How much have I spliced into my memory?
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When I Couldn’t Look at Myself in the Mirror, My Friend Looked for Me by Shifra Sharlin and Carol Troen
On the other hand, I hated the port. It turned me into a cancer machine. It frightened me, too. I couldn’t look at it. So I asked Carol to make a portrait.
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Elegy / Eulogy / Ode by Lacey N. Dunham
For months now, you have not been able to walk through the daily din into the madness, and your life has felt more textured, your days fuller, though you will not admit that you might be happier this way.
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The Back of the Cereal Box by Jennifer Fliss
At the bottom of the box, amidst the impossibly small pearls of sugar and sharp crumbs, you will never find what you are looking for. Nothing will make you see things differently. But you will never stop searching.
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Chaos by Julia Charlotte
When life feels chaotic, it makes me feel better to remember that it is; everything is depressing, but cover it in flowers.
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Landscapes of a Pandemic by Teow Lim Goh
Here I skate 10 km, bringing my season total to 191 km. Dust on crust, and I come out early enough that I make first tracks. What I do not yet know is that this will be the last picture that I would take before we go into lockdown.
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InnerChild4U by Bowie Rowan
Imagine you are walking through tall grass, your hand brushing against green blade after blade. Walk through your memories like they are tall blades of grass. Let them brush up against you.
Read MoreContingency Plans by Belle (Bom) Kim
Perhaps I won't be wholly lost if I can make something from this pain.
Read MoreAmerikan Swamp by Sonya Bilocerkowycz and Chris Stevens
Recall how deep the roots that gulp this ground. There is no draining what’s already drowned.
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The Overview Effect by Lindsey Drager
Put every person on earth into space. This way they’ll see our orb for what it is, a brittle particle in a vast and infinite blank nothing. We’ll send one person at a time. Everything has more meaning when you’re alone.
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