...maybe this playlist is a small gift I can give that helps, that heals.
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Poetry by Julia Laxer
Sea anemones grow every year. She remembers. She’s not the hunter
but knows provocation. I sing to the bees and make honeycakes.
2 Poetry Collections That Will Change Your World
Joanna C. Valente is a ghost 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 (The Operating System, 2017), Xenos (Agape Editions, 2016), and Sexting Ghosts (Unknown Press, 2018). They are the editor of A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault (CCM, 2017), and received a MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Joanna 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 their writing has appeared in Brooklyn Magazine, BUST, Them, Prelude, Apogee, Spork, The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere.
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My Hair Is Not a Petty Thing
My hair is not a petty thing. My hair holds stories.
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The Tattoo That Began as a Declaration of Love Is Now a Memorial
Lauren Spinabelli is a writer from Pittsburgh, currently living in Brooklyn, New York. My work has been published in Elite Daily, Luna Luna, Strangelet Journal, and Bop Dead City.
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What It Means to Be an Empath
I stare at his photographs sometimes and I try to find where it is: In his beard, his wrinkles, or his shining eyes. Where does it live, Whitman? This thing you call a wound, this love you carry? And why does it live within me too?
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Interview with Sweta Srivastava Vikram About Her Debut U.S. Novel 'Louisiana Catch'
Parts of the book are funny and romantic, writing that's easy; the parts about sexual violence were difficult to write. I had to envision the darkness, conduct in-depth research, interview psychotherapists, recall some victim confessions from over a decade ago, and feel the sense of betrayal and shame that a sexual assault survivor might actually feel. I wanted to write with sensitivity without patronizing anyone.
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The New Ambient Album You Need to Listen To
Joanna C. Valente is a ghost 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 (The Operating System, 2017), Xenos (Agape Editions, 2016), and Sexting Ghosts (Unknown Press, 2018). They are the editor of A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault (CCM, 2017), and received a MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Joanna 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 their writing has appeared in Brooklyn Magazine, BUST, Them, Prelude, Apogee, Spork, The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere.
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via SvD
A Poet I’ve Never Heard Of: Karin Boye
The fourth poet in this series is Karin Boye, a Swedish poet born in Gothenburg in 1900. Her first collection of poems, entitled Clouds came out on 1922. In 1931 founded the poetry magazine Spektrum with Erik Mesterton and Josef Riwkin, translating many of T.S. Eliot’s poems.
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Falling in Love with the Rose: Some Beautiful Images To Make Your Day
Sappho called roses the lightening of beauty. Rumi wrote that the rose’s rarest essence lives in its thorns. Picasso once lamented you can complain because roses have thorns, or you can rejoice because thorns have roses.
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These Valentines Are Hilariously Weird & Strange
Joanna C. Valente is the author of Sirs & Madams, The Gods Are Dead, Marys of the Sea, Xenos, and the editor of A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault.
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Poetry by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland
Ages ago, this town was all wood.
You had to get to know each tree as a
madrina. You knew this birch that creaks
with wind guides you west; this willow with
bark soft as hair would sing songs from
before the arrival of sky. And everyone
could hear the spirits.
Alice Teeple
Dear Jesse, by Andi Talarico
BY ANDI TALARICO
Dear Jesse,
Happy 29th birthday in prison.
Dear Jesse,
I write this to you on your 29th birthday, which you’ll spend in prison.
Dear Jesse,
Happy Birthday, little brother, in prison.
Dear Jesse,
I meant half-brother. It matters.
Dear Jesse-
I don’t know how to write this letter. I don’t know how to do it.
Dear Jesse-
I’m sorry.
Dear Jesse,
I hate you.
Dear Jesse,
Her life mattered too.
Dear Jesse,
She was 23. She was 23 and you gunned her down over $60 worth of shit heroin. You did that.
Dear Jesse,
I hate you.
I hate you for making this family the wrong kind of poor. A snarl of statistics on rural poverty, a tragedy so common, so small, you’re not even a footnote in the 10 page New Yorker article on the opioid epidemic. I read it on the train to work. I read a clinical article on the pharmaceutical industry on the train to work in New York City. In my ears, airpods scanned the highs and lows of Chet Baker. The most distant mirror.
I read about your world at arm’s length. I thought of you saying-
“Fuck you, Andrea, and your perfect fucking life.”
“Give me 20 bucks, Andrea. I know you got it.”
“You’re not better than me.”
I’m not.
I am.
I’m not.
Dear Jesse,
I watch your arrest on the news. They show a picture of the dead girl on the bottom right corner of the screen. The reporter asks you what you have to say for yourself. You snarl,
“Get out of my face.”
I am.
I’m not.
I am.
Dear Jesse,
I know you’re no broken branch on a perfect family tree. Not even a tree, really, a snarl of a thorny bush, really, a tangle of blighted limbs, really. To call anything that happens here cyclical is to bestow too much order upon it. Really.
Dear Jesse,
We have different fathers. Yours was not a great man. Let’s say that. Let’s remember that when his chemicals crested or cratered, the wrong pill, say, the wrong smoke, the wrong spike, the wrong sniff, it usually ended badly for our mother. You’re too young to remember her broken arm. You’re too young to remember when he still drank. I watched him pour a beer over her head during an argument. I watched her hurl a glass ashtray at his face and almost blind him.
Dear Jesse,
I remember.
Dear Jesse,
I was seven when you were born, barely not a baby myself. I learned how to love a new human through you, your bright brown eyes reflecting everything you saw around you, new and holy through you. You, on my hip. You, taking the bottle in my hand. You, a small version of me. You, making a big sister of me. You. You named me DeeDee. I named you Young King. I wanted to give the world to you. You.
Dear Jesse,
Our mother joked that she named you for Jesse James. She always liked the bad boys best.
Dear Jesse,
Your father was one of the worst.
Dear Jesse,
I know it was right after he died that you spent your first bout in Juvie. What were you, twelve? Thirteen?
Dear Jesse,
I know that you chose violence over grief, or violence through grief, or violence as grief, or that maybe violence is a grief, or that maybe grief is a violence in that it can murder the person bearing the weight of it.
Jesse,
It is not lost on me that your drug of choice is a pain-killer.
Dear Jesse,
I love you.
Dear Jesse,
I hate you.
Jesse,
That poor woman. I grieve for her life.
Jesse,
You poor child. I grieve for yours as well.
Jesse,
The letter I send will say just this,
“Dear Jesse,
Try to have a happy birthday. You know I’m here if you need books. Love you, little brother.”
Andi Talarico is a Brooklyn-based writer and reader. She’s the curator and host of At the Inkwell NYC, an international reading series whose New York branch meets at KGB Bar. She's taught poetry in classrooms as a rostered artist, and acted as coach and judge for Poetry Out Loud. In 2003, Paperkite Press published her chapbook, Spinning with the Tornado, and Swandive Publishing included her in the 2014 anthology, Everyday Escape Poems. She also penned a literary arts column for Electric City magazine for several years. When she’s not working with stationery company Baron Fig, she can be found reading tarot cards, supporting independent bookstores, and searching for the best oyster Happy Hour in NYC.
Photo captions by Barba.
My partner and I in Bakersfield for their First Friday in January 2018.
That Zine Life: Laguna Collective's Jemimah Barba
Paper, pen, stapler. Your voice.
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Writer & Artist Joshua Byron on Being Nonbinary & Navigating the Dating World
Joanna C. Valente is a ghost 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 (The Operating System, 2017), Xenos (Agape Editions, 2016), and Sexting Ghosts (Unknown Press, 2018). They are the editor of A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault (CCM, 2017), and received a MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Joanna 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 their writing has appeared in Brooklyn Magazine, BUST, Them, Prelude, Apogee, Spork, The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere.
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