PHOTO CREDIT: Synesthesia Music Collective
I immediately became engrossed with her trip-hop and R&B sound that is reminiscent of artists like Tricky, Massive Attack, and Portishead. The visually surreal magic of her videos is dark, ethereal, melancholy, evocative, and seductive. One can’t help think of Björk when watching the filmic narrative of the songs on screen with Sevdaliza’s opulent and Giger-esque biomechanical body in “Marilyn Monroe” or the erotic centauress in “Human.”
Read MoreBy the time my husband and I purchased an apartment in Alphabet City, all my idols were dead. I imagined their ghosts making fun of people like me who crawled into the East Village hoping to have babies and a volunteer gig in a community garden. But I was desperate to belong to a neighborhood that represented my values, ideals, and dreams of a creative life—a neighborhood with a storied history and its share of ghosts.
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As a tiny bruja is the late 80s, I was obsessed with gothic fairy-tale fantasy films. Here I am, in my magick thirties, still playing dress up…
Read MoreIan Kappos was born and raised in Northern California. Over two dozen of his works of short fiction, nonfiction and poetry have appeared online and in print. Co-editor of Milkfist (www.milkfist.com), he sort of maintains a website at www.iankappos.net.
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The Death of Albine (1895) by John Maler Collier.
There are many ways we attempt to cast the spell of remembrance, to leave our mark, to cause a beautiful and painful ache in our absence even if it is only temporary. This is just another way we strange and intricate humans crave to be loved.
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Persona (1966)
For a drawn out 60 seconds we stood there just staring at each and laughing out of fear. The pressure set in. We knew we had about 30 seconds to make this happen before the guys started booing, leaving us up there, and moving onto something more exciting. Drunken frat guys have the attention span of newborn puppies. I felt panicked. My fantasies about kissing a girl usually took place during a calm game of spin the bottle or truth of dare in a dim lit basement. In my fantasy I was already a little buzzed. The buzz was what gave me permission to indulge. I had never felt more sober. My armpits were sweating, and I could feel my pulse pushing out of my throat. Meredith looked at me, now also panicked. Then without warning she leaned in and kissed me. It happened all at once and in total slow motion. I felt her tongue. I couldn't believe how soft her lips felt. I heard cheering. Before I could open my eyes it ended. She hopped off the stage and a group of guys ushered her into the kitchen. I stood frozen. My veins felt hot. My face flushed. Electricity ran through me. I’d kissed plenty of guys, but I had never experienced these sensations. I wanted more.
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Yayoi Kusama
My mother was furious; she embarked on a nightlong analysis of everything I was doing wrong in my life, as she often did. Halfway into her thesis, however, her anger turned to tears. It was a big deal, she said, her voice cracking, because by changing my tickets to later in the day, I would arrive at Tokyo close to midnight, and would be forced to find my way around a foreign country carrying two large suitcases in the dark, on my own. It was a big deal, because I was twisting myself to fit into the contour of the world around me, even if it meant bending myself so far I was hurting myself, as if all I deserved was the leftover nook of whatever people threw at me. I would make myself small and try to crawl into that space, and I would crawl with my head down, with my arms tucked by my sides, worried about accidentally poking someone with my elbows.
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Photo by Monique Quintana
Bluish, you find the stone. They are the diamonds she once told you about...
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Martin Knize
Ming-Ying is a human interested in the intersection of art, education, and activism. Her art centers around social justice, the feminine, and all things cute. She is passionate about: Black Lives Matter, Asian Pacific-Islander representation, queer counter-narratives, and educational equity. She also loves cheeseburgers, despite half-hearted aspirations to be vegetarian.
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Oscar Keys
Sage Curtis is a Bay Area writer fascinated by the way cities grit and women move. My work has been published or is forthcoming in Main Street Rag, burntdistrict, Yes Poetry, The Fem Lit, Vagabond City Lit and more.
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Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), The Gods Are Dead (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015), Marys of the Sea (ELJ Publications, 2016), Xenos (Agape Editions, 2016) and the editor of A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault (CCM, 2017). Joanna received a MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and is also the founder of Yes, Poetry, a managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine and CCM, as well as an instructor at Brooklyn Poets. Some of Joanna's writing has appeared in Prelude, Apogee, Spork, The Feminist Wire, BUST, and elsewhere.
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Via cromos
When aesthetic is subversive, it is both strange and beautiful…
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Auto Europe
Two years before his death, when he was already widowed and battling congestive heart failure, Dad's bon voyage gift to me turned extravagant. Rather than one of his homemade or home-grown presents, he pushed a small white envelope across the dinner table at me. Inside was a wad of crisp new bank notes.
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Clem Onojeghuo
When I was 12, I came home to discover my father’s car with its doors flung open. From the front seats, two pairs of legs stretched onto the pavement. The radio was on low, and I could hear laughter followed by a clink of glass on glass. This was how my father celebrated an ersatz out-of-body death, five years prior to the real thing.
Read MoreKristin Chang lives in NY. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in VINYL, The Shade Journal, Nightblock, Cosmonauts Avenue, the Asian American Writers Workshop, and elsewhere. She is currently on staff at Winter Tangerine and writes for Teen Vogue.
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