Anemites
Sometimes I think about it, though. Sex, not love. I imagine scenarios as graphically as possible in order to see how much I can stand. It’s like a test. When I feel the bile coming up into my throat, that’s when I stop. It usually doesn’t take very long. I stare at the grass, or a garbage can, or anything really normal and asexual, to get those sick images of calloused thumbs and everyday disfigurements out of my head.
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BY LISA MARIE BASILE
Luna Luna is seeking two new assistant editors/curators for our 1) Intersectional Feminism & 2) Lifestyle verticals. These magical, wonderful geniuses will help us curate new voices and diversify our content and contributor base.
Our assistant editor roles are flexible; we provide the opportunity to take creative liberty as it relates to your skills. So long as you sync with the brand, or you feel you can better the brand, we want to work with you.
It is vital that Luna Luna be home to a wide array of voices and identities. We want to provide a platform to underrepresented, marginalized, underprivileged and silenced voices.
To apply: lunalunamag@gmail.com. Send us a note, a reason, a love letter, or your story. Please send specific ideas around how you can help us and how we can help you or support your vision. Be able to contribute 2 hours per week, volunteer (as all of our editorships are at this time). Communicative, social-media savvy people, please.
Also! We're seeking content for our special issue on RELATIONSHIPS & LOVE. Personal essays or features welcome. Video and photo welcome. Word count: 500-1200. Due March 1.
Possible topics:
via pijamasurf
Poets must live in the world but also outside of it. We are so influenced by our immediate surroundings yet able to transform the ordinary into oddly slanted and surreal visions. Even the rain itself in Paz’s poem is personified, "rising and walking away." Everyday images are conflated and merged, mixed up and re-envisioned. According to Paz, "Poetry is memory become image, and image become voice. The other voice is not the voice from beyond the grave: it is that of man fast asleep in the heart of hearts of mankind. It is a thousand years old and as old as you and I, and it has not yet been born." In essence, as he says in his poem, poetry happens in "another time that is now," and that’s an incredibly difficult place in which to live. How does one balance between the present moment and the past? This reminds me of holding tree pose in yoga. Poems encapsulate what is right in front of us but also a part of our memories. They call on our whole menagerie of obsessions and ideas about the world to sort possible truths.
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My world was utterly destroyed by Natalie Diaz at Brooklyn Book Festival in 2014. Two years later, I still remember. I was lucky enough to have heard Natalie read her poetry and discuss identity & womanhood at a panel hosted by St. Francis College, and moderated by Hafizah Geter. Her words moved me; her words dove straight into my own mouth, restructuring my cells, taking away some and adding others both newer & stronger. The word ‘move’ is a verb which means, “a change of place or position.”
via Being Photographed
At some point in my development, before I entered high school, I’m sure, I knew two fundamental facts about myself: I am a writer, and I wasn’t one to marry until I was at least 28.
via Vol 1 Brooklyn
Elizabeth Bishop was a poet whose personal life was fraught with family struggles, questions of sexuality, and a great deal of loss. A casual reader might recall some of these emotions exhibited in her masterful villanelle, “One Art.” Filmmakers have even attempted to capture snippets of Bishop’s interior life during her time in Brazil in the recent movie, Reaching for the Moon. However, despite the fact that she moved throughout her life and perhaps never found her “place,” her readers can sense that she felt a strong tie to family, legacy, and her historical moment. Bishop’s “Poem,” a short piece about a puzzling family heirloom, serves as an excellent example of how she negotiated her historical ties, ties that in many ways have formed the basis of my complicated relationship with Bishop’s work.
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BY LARISA CASILLAS
'Your head is a haunted house.'
Sometime during the Occult Humanities Conference this phrase was uttered and it stuck with me throughout.
Afterwards, during a private viewing of Language of the Birds: Occult and Art (which will show at NYU February 12-13) I was able to see what it meant.
Spanning over a century of occult art, the exhibition has 60 works by different modern and contemporary artists who delved deep into their minds and tried to transcend rationality. The exhibition is curated by Pam Grossman, the creator of the occult blog Phantasmaphile and also the co-organizer of the Occult Humanities Conference.
"By going within, then drawing streams of imagery forth through their creations, each of these artists seeks to render the invisible visible, to materialize the immaterial, and to tell us that we, too, can enter numinous realms," she writes.
Language of the Birds is divided into 5 sections: Cosmos, Spirits, Practitioners, Altars and Spells. The art ranges from the visually beautiful to the unnerving and intellectually engaging; from Aleister Crowley’s alter ego self-portrait, Ken Henson’s portrait of the goddess Ishtar, Robert Buratti’s dreamy Sub Rosa and Paul Laffoley’s Astrological Ouroboros, with the twelve signs of the zodiac paired with the twelve stages of changes of attitude toward life--each piece challenges you to feel rather than analyze.
Speaking to Luna Luna about the current appeal magic and the occult has on the younger generation, Grossman cited that for women it honors cycles and gives agency, "witchcraft is about embracing the body," she says. And as for men, it gives them the freedom to explore alternative types of spirituality--"you don’t just need one book," she concluded.
Language of the Birds: Occult and Art
January 12 – February 13, 2016
80WSE, 80 Washington Square East, NYC
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.
All images via here.
via Wired
Recently, I had the privlege of reading Liz Axelrod's chapbook "Go Ask Alice" (Finishing Line Press, 2016), which was a finalist in the 2015 New Women's Voices Series at Finishing Line Press. In the collection, Axelrod invites us into a bizarre, distorted landscape similar, echoing Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" landscape. She doesn't stray away from what we are all obsessed and anxious over--sex, body image, technology, politics--and makes us evaluate the world we live in.
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Via Flickr
BY LISA MARIE BASILE
Rape culture: when your friend is raped by her cab driver and the police question whether or not you were asking for it.
In a major metropolitan city, there's plenty of things to fear. Among them? Cab drivers. Many of us have encountered the driver who tells us we’re pretty, asks if we’re single, wants to know if we live with someone or asks for our phone numbers. It’s uncomfortable, it’s frightening, and it needs to stop. Simply put, this behavior should be illegal rather than commonplace.
A friend told me the below story:
*Mary took a cab home--pulled over by her friends--because she was inebriated. She woke in the cab driver's bed without any recollection of what happened, with her body oddly positioned on top of a towel. As an object. When she managed to get out of his apartment, go to the hospital and ask for a rape kit, she was told to wait because there wasn't enough proof it "wasn’t consensual." Mary tells me that this cab driver (who she calls Sandy), who was employed by the city of New York, wasn't convicted because the District Attorney took a rapist’s word over hers.
***
When Mary and I talk on the phone, she tells me it is crucial to tell her story in order for change to ensue, in order for the government and for everyday people to understand that a woman’s word means something, that silencing others is a sin on par with rape itself.
***
There was more than enough evidence to lead anyone to believe the cab driver was a rapist. When Mary was put into a Brooklyn cab by two friends, they explicitly asked the driver to take Mary home. Mary was inebriated, as many are when they take a cab home late at night, and so her friends made her repeat her address to the driver several times. There was no indication that Mary knew the driver or desired anything but to get home safely.
What Mary vaguely remembers is someone buying beer, and according to her police report, "pouring liquor or some substance down my throat," as she was "in and out of consciousness." What she next remembers is waking up "extremely confused" with "no idea why or how I had gotten to this location or who this person in the bed next to me was." Mary was distressed, still not sober, and panicking.
Over the phone, she told me her body was "still in pain." This is a jarring sentence to hear. Because what happened to her was real; the physical pain will eventually end, but the experience of being manipulated against your will can never be undone.
***
When Mary went to the Emergency Room at Mt. Sinai in Queens at 3pm, she sat alone for the most part, without the offer of any food or water. Two officers finally arrived at 6pm as per the Hospital’s request, and they were aggressive, according to Mary, suggesting without her memory of the incident in question there could be no prosecution.
Mary told me, "I was stunned with how poorly these men treated me in my hospital room. They pressured me to drop the case and tried to tell me it wasn’t a rape case, and that if I was drunk, that maybe I had 'gotten friendly with the cab driver' while I was in the car."
She continued, "I was so distraught, I couldn’t believe the officers were insinuating it was my fault…[they] didn’t believe anything I told them, and were being so dismissive and aggressive. I even told them I had two witnesses who put me into the cab alone with the driver...they still insisted I didn’t need the rape kit. I insisted I hadn’t gone [with the driver] by choice, that I had been taken advantage of while I was blacked out, and that it was a taxi driver who had done this…[in his] house in Queens."
Because Mary was drunk, her case wasn’t taken seriously--and this outcome isn’t news. Women have long been taken advantage of when inebriated or drugged. Despite the many victim-blaming mentalities out there, transitive theory does not suggest if one drinks, one consents to the possibility of rape.
"They said since I had been drunk I had no idea where he had taken me or what borough I’d been in," Mary said. "My doctor at Mt. Sinai was extremely upset with how they were treating me, and they called Mount Sinai’s Sexual Assault And Violence Intervention Program (SAVI) to have an advocate sent to help me and make sure I was being treated ok."
SAVI’s mission is "dedicated to validating, healing and empowering survivors and their supporters to lead safe, healthy lives through advocacy, free and confidential counseling, and public education."
Despite SAVI’s efforts in supporting Mary, the police (the only presiding power) didn’t believe Mary until she semi-remembered signage she thought she saw that night. Only then did they confirm with the location services map on her iPhone, which indicated when she’d been picked up and for how long she was in that location (his home).
The next day, the cops found the location services information to be enough "proof," so they had Mary call her rapist from the Queens Precinct. The detective asked Mary to "act like I knew we had sex, and just ask if he used protection and see if he would say anything about me being passed out to try to get him to incriminate himself over the phone, which would be recorded over the police system."
When she called Sandy, she asked if they’d "slept together," to which he answered yes. Mary told me it was painful to hear that Sandy’s admission, though suspected, was devastating. Mary had actually been raped.
"I then asked him why I wasn’t able to recall anything and he said I was passing out…the detective was writing me prompts of what to ask him so I asked if I had passed out totally, and he claimed I passed out 'during sex' and he kept saying 'don’t worry about it,'" Mary said.
If a person takes you against your will and has non-consensual sex with you when you’re incapacitated, that it is rape shouldn’t be up for debate.
Judging by the FBI’s revised definition of rape, "Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim," there should be no room for misinterpretation, and yet there is--along with shoddy police work, held up by the foundation of rape culture.
By New York state law, what Mary’s cab driver did was certainly first or second degree rape, given the mental incapacity to provide consent, along with the kidnapping. How much more real does this get?
In the end, the detective told Mary the District Attorney had dropped the case on account of there being no real proof (as her rapist simply had to say something to the effect of 'she wanted it') and that was it.
***
The reality is, many rape allegations aren’t taken seriously.
Recently, a woman was raped at the popular Happy Ending Lounge, a bar even I frequented for years as a literary host. With its dimly lit bathrooms and somewhat hidden downstairs areas, it scares me to think of the all-too-real possibility of the situation--a situation any of us could be put into. The cops, instead of taking the victim seriously, claimed she was a party girl. And, even if she were drinking and "partying," does that mean she deserves to be raped?
In 2015, there were 851 reported rape cases in NYC (an increase from last year), with rape in car services on the upward trend. In February this year, a Brooklyn woman was raped in the back of a cab. This came at a time when Uber and Lyft drivers assaulted dozens and dozens of passengers. Mary’s case is one of many.
What happens when walking home is too unsafe? When the subway is unsafe? When taking a bus is unsafe? And when the person paid to drive you home changes your life forever?
***
Why are victims still being silenced? Is it because we teach people to wear protective, anti date-rape nail polish rather than teaching them not to rape? Rather than enforcing very real punishment for rapists? Does the problem stem from the idea that rape is only rape when it’s violent? Is it not widely accepted that rape takes various forms? On television, and in books, is it too-often reduced to compulsive desire or fantastical dominance? Or, is it much more likely we blame the victims in our smug, sexist righteousness to prosecute the whore? Are we too busy making jokes about it on TV?
Mary explained how even after going to the hospital, she felt there was no real advocacy. She felt like there aren’t enough emotional resources available quickly, and more importantly, how any support she was given paled in comparison to the poor treatment by the police. She felt she was not heard.
She wrote in her police statement, "I want help in having someone actually investigate this crime…the suspect was not apprehended and is still driving a cab around the city with no repercussions. This is dangerous for me as he knows where I live and I am very scared for my safety, and for other women’s safety. If he got away with this once with me with NO repercussions he will probably do this again and that is not acceptable. I do not understand how this does not qualify as kidnapping and rape, and I also do not understand why the case was dropped due to what the suspect told police."
Whether you are telling the story to a counselor, the news or your friend, your voice matters. Whether you are sharing this story or another one, your part in the conversation matters. As Pepper Elliott, who was assaulted at Happy Ending, said, "I really do believe social media is a powerful platform that can be a catalyst to these types of changes in perception, which eventually result in changes in behavior. I think that potentially the result of me being this vocal about my experience will at least elicit minor changes in the way those who are close to me might think or act and those changes might permeate the minds of others."
Please reach out to the following resources if you or someone you know needs support:
National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800.656.HOPE (4673)
RAINN: http://nownyc.org/service-fund/get-help/rape-sexual-assault/
SAVI: http://www.mountsinai.org/patient-care/service-areas/community-medicine/areas-of-care/sexual-assault-and-violence-intervention-program-savi/services
The New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault: http://www.svfreenyc.org/survivors_emergency.html
NYS Department of Health: https://www.health.ny.gov/prevention/sexual_violence/what_to_do.htm
The New York State Coalition Against Sexual Assault: http://nyscasa.org/get-help/crisis-centers-by-county/
BY JOANNA C. VALENTE
Edward Gorey made a Tarot deck and it's basically the best thing ever. I have it, so I can vouch. Here's a preview:
Kelly Davio has a piece up at Change Seven called "Kylie Jenner and Her Golden Wheels:"
"Yet we don’t have to buy it. Most considerate people recognize that popular culture has a body image problem, and that we do women and girls serious harm when we celebrate certain body shapes while devaluing others. Unfortunately, that realization has given us a new obsession: looking 'healthy' is our new substitute for looking thin. For those of us for whom looking well or able is just as unattainable as, say, heaving our way into a pair of size-zero jeans, that supposedly positive message isn’t positive at all."
Lady Gaga released a powerful music video about sexual assault:
After Texas cut Planned Parenthood funding, birth rates went up, according to Los Angeles Times:
"Though only 23 of the 254 counties in Texas had a Planned Parenthood clinic before 2013, they served 60% of the state’s low-income women of childbearing age, according to the study."
Beth Ditto on makeup and feminism at Vogue:
"… I discovered the Riot Grrrl movement, and that really changed everything for me. Girls were picking and choosing pieces of 'female' fashion and twisting them: lipstick and baby doll dresses paired with dirty Converse and a skateboard; a cute pageboy haircut and a child’s barrette with hairy armpits and a guitar. I stopped seeing makeup, shaved legs, and dresses as the enemy. They aren’t imperatives of being female; they’re part of a costume that people of any gender can choose to wear or not."
The CDC "recommended" that women of child-bearing age who are not on birth control SHOULD NOT drink, according to The Washington Post. Uhhh, OK. Policing women's bodies much?
Mukundo Angulo on how his imagination set him free at TEDxTeens. He was one of the six brothers in the documentary "The Wolfpack," which focused on Mukunda and his brothers being raised in a New York public housing apartment isolated from society by their paranoid, overbearing father.
Hannah Lee Jones has a poem over at Apogee:
"And so I was born not of my parents but a welter of syllables, none of which I remember at the Kung Fu demonstration where I spot the little brother of mine, the soup gone from his face, beaming in the crowd and who could no more be my brother than that black kid splitting a cinder block could be Chinese. Oh me, oh life, here’s to another year of pride in whatever you are under the scarlet lights of a holiday that is and isn’t yours, mouthing verses in a play where your teacher calls you by the name of your Filipino classmate, and you feel alike, and different, and lonely, and no longer lonely all at once."
Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), The Gods Are Dead (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015) & Marys of the Sea (forthcoming 2016, ELJ Publications). She received her MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She is also the founder of Yes, Poetry, as well as the chief editor for Luna Luna Magazine.
Cesar Ancelle Hansen
Curated by Lisa A. Flowers
Pantone 13-1520: Rose Quartz
Ask why the seas were not made to be pink, for extra consideration
inquiring if they’d like to be repainted. This
is the best question to occupy the wonder with.
Feed curiosity not through the bars of a cage like some mutt,
but on an opal plate. Offer cutlery
that isn’t known to exist. And when she grows her marrow
shall be rich in sugared peach slices as a service
to those who will be taking bites out of her soon. Bathe
her wounds in this same pink sea –
even nature doesn’t mind experimentation –
dress them with last year’s wish lists. That way
she’ll have something to think on while she verifies your star
charts, proposing the longest possible route.
Pantone 15-3919: Serenity
Find comfort at the bottom of a swimming pool, among
the accumulated remains of fizzy soda giggles
and unfulfilled kisses. If that’s not enough find street
lamps that have not yet been robbed of their lightbulb hearts.
Collect them. Absorb the aroma
that only comes from the most intimate rambles
released around dusk. And when you’ve filled up go back
to the bottom of that pool. You’ll find the sun
dances best when the water has swallowed you whole,
telling stories along the way about every flower it has dreamed
of growing. If only someone was considerate enough
to walk past with an ink bottle.
Margaryta Golovchenko is a first year undergrad student at the University of Toronto, Canada, and serves as an editor for The Spectatorial and Half Mystic. Her work has appeared in [parenthetical], In/Words, The Impressment Gang, and other publications, and her debut chapbook, Miso Mermaid, is forthcoming from words(on)pages press this fall. She is an avid tea drinker and a collector of trinkets and curiosities. When not maneuvering around her mountain of to-be-read books she can be found sharing her (mis)adventures on Twitter @Margaryta505.
Inge Prader
I met Zach while choking on a Vietnamese Spring Roll at Lemon Grass, in University Heights. I was on a blind date with a man named William, my first date after my divorce to Hank.
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Valentin Flauraud
I ask the theatre to do what any art form might--to engage my mind or my heart in a fearless and powerful way. And, because theatre as a medium hinges on immediate contributions by fellow humans, because the energy shared between those onstage and off is unique to each performance, when I go to the theatre I am hopeful that what I see will touch both heart and mind; that it will not just pull me out of my own experience but enrich it, challenge it, grant it new, glimmering, or unexpected dimension.
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Victoria Dawe, courtesy of Skirt Club
Skirt Club is an underground community for girls who play with girls. It was set up in 2014 by Geneviève LeJeune, who had attended "play parties" with a male ex. She soon realized she was doing things for his pleasure, not her own. So she decided to make Skirt Club for ladies only. It hosts a private members network for the curious kind; both in mind and sexuality. Skirt Club promotes glamour; free-flowing champagne, burlesque performers and…much more. Luna Luna spoke with founder Geneviève LeJeune in anticipation of Skirt Club’s upcoming launch party on February 4 in New York City.
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Stephani Scutari
Artist and comedian Lisa Levy threw off her robe and sat naked on the porcelain throne placed in the center of Christopher Stout Gallery. You heard that right. In her performance art piece The Artist is Humbly Present, Levy mocked the art world, pretension, and herself. During the performance, viewers were invited to sit opposite Levy on a facing toilet and interact with her in any way, other than touching her. If you’re familiar with Marina Ambramovic’s performance at MoMA, The Artist is Present, where viewers were invited to sit and face the artist in a chair, you’ll immediately understand the blatant reference.
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