Reading Note: My frequent re-reads, to remember the strange, wonderful animal and artist you are: Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee
Ode to Mud Season – A Vispo Journal
Outside the Children’s & Maternity Thrift Shop Outside the children’s & maternity thrift shop stood the little girl with her dog looking down at the wet sidewalk. The worms are dying, she said, dragging each syllable through sad honey, which startled me— I was not expecting to be addressed, having forgotten the gift of perception […]
Stars Amid Rubble
Ukrainian Poetry in English: A Portfolio from Sibelan Forrester followed by her notes The Susan W. Lippincott Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Russian at Swarthmore College, Sibelan Forrester specializes in twentieth-century Russian poetry and Russian women writers. An award-winning translator, Professor Forrester has published translations from Serbian, Croatian, Russian, and Ukrainian. She selects […]
Hook, Scalpel, Clamp, Hole
I am sitting at my kitchen island, my hands floating like two pale moths over two sheets of printing paper. Atop the sheets is a standard hospital logo printed in jeweled tones. On the first sheet falls clearly numbered post-surgical instructions, the phone number of a physician. On the second, there is a series of […]
From “The Violet Hours”
Nude Dancer with Aulos by Arnold Genthe. Original from The Rijksmuseum. From the point of view of love, look at this: a bank of purple irises, petals hanging like narrow tongues, the chipped tooth of a lover after tripping in the garden, the blood that rushes between the teeth like a tidal wave. See the […]
Five Essays on Mold While We Wait to Be Cleaned
How Mold Wants a Home as Badly as I Do, But Finding a Home Is the Same as Losing Your Name for It I feel sadness for the mold, a decayed reasoning, swimming pool drained and left with only the scum, but it is a living scum, scum that emanates an urge, the urge to […]
You Came Back / 回来了
i. https://fenceportal.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/You-Came-Back-Reading.mp3 (Read by the author) From the outside looking in, the way I look is the most obvious thing about being foreign; that I am most obviously foreign to others here in China. Some people will stare at me when I walk down the street, ride the bus, or walk around the grocery. Some […]
The Representation of Light Penetrating Mud
https://fenceportal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/The-Representation-of-Mud-Spanish-and-English-Alternating.mp3 Absence gives form to all shapes—Theodora Blüht Sand and mountains in the center. The future rises before the fjord. Mercilessly. Stones in the cemetery—the expectation. Shadows, swifter than life. Genuflection. Skin in a symbolic state. The brow performing in a muscular cavity. Bird […]
Amplification
H has a childhood memory of lying in bed at the farm listening to a soft, high pitch cut into the slow quiet. It’s a little like feedback but purer, like feedback’s crystalline cousin, and it gets louder until it’s directly behind her eyes. She lies still but begins to panic as it gets louder; […]
Madre
Madre A woman How many times we fled from the world, How long they burned our hands: Long we served the office of giving birth, cooking dinner, raising beasts. They relegated us to be trophies, in the halls of important men. We bit our tongues in the face of insults, we stayed our fists, before […]
