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; […]
