Category Archives: Great Poems Online

August Links Roundup: That’s Not My Department

“‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.” Rest in peace to that great satirist of American warmongering, Tom Lehrer, who exited this mad world in July at the age of 97. The Harvard-trained mathematician’s fame rests on his catalogue of political humor songs that he wrote in the 1950s-60s, skewering such targets as obscenity law, the Catholic Church, and the nuclear arms race. The songs endure because the jokes don’t depend on political details from yesteryear. The cultural currents they tap into are deeper features of American life. Everything I knew about 20th-century American politics as a junior high schooler, I learned from the Stockbridge Library’s copies of Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer and Jules Feiffer’s America, From Eisenhower to Reagan.

Maybe not as deep, but almost as funny, Thea Von Engelbrechten’s TikTok and Instagram video series Sylvanian Drama puts cutesy Calico Critters figurines in soap-opera predicaments involving adultery and day drinking. The critters’ manufacturer, Epoch Company, recently dropped its lawsuit against Von Engelbrechten, probably figuring that all publicity is good publicity. I’m guessing that adults care more about Barbie nowadays than children do, especially after the 2023 movie. Epoch’s future may lie in generating a cult following for fuzzy toy hedgehogs who behave like BoJack Horseman.

While we’re on the topic of strange adult crossovers with children’s media, I got a kick out of the video “Werner Herzog reads Where’s Waldo?“ Listen to the moody film director search for Waldo “in the chaotic morass of society”. Hat tip to Winning Writers Managing Editor Anne Mydla for this one.

Vincent Antonio Rendoni’s found-poem “Subject Lines from Democratic Fundraisers in an Election Year”, published in Bodega Mag, will make you laugh and cry at the same time. With nothing more than line breaks and juxtapositions, he turns familiar email banalities into a cri de coeur of helplessness and fragmented attention brought on by our political crisis. Hat tip to Cavar.

In her essay in the July/August Poets & Writers, “The Author’s Wife is Also an Author”, Erin Almond opens up about the unequal trajectories of her fiction-writing career and that of her husband, Steve Almond. Patriarchal expectations from extended family and society seep into their marriage despite their egalitarian intentions. Moreover, the obstacles to women’s success can become a tempting way to let herself off the hook for the often unrewarded work of being an artist.

The question of whose work is “indulged” and whose work is seen as “necessary” is one I suspect has attended the relationships of other artist couples throughout history. I deeply admire my husband’s writing and think he deserves every accolade he’s ever gotten; at the same time, as the years have gone by, I’ve come into an increasing awareness of how quick I’ve been to step aside, put down my own projects, and direct my attention elsewhere. Much of this is due to external forces—how often I’ve been praised for my mothering or my attention to some mundane, logistical detail, versus my writing—but I’ll admit that some of it is internal, too. Writing a novel is incredibly difficult, and while laundry can be tedious, it’s not hard. There are plenty of afternoons when I could have been writing but instead folded towels and dreamed. But, of course, at the end of the day the laundry must be done—and what makes it feel urgent to devote time to writing a novel? Some external reward? Or an internal sense that the work is important, regardless of its reception?

…Maybe I’m wrong, then, to take issue with my literary ambitions being described as a “fantasy,” while my husband’s are considered real and worthy of a life’s work. Maybe I shouldn’t take that word as an insult, because isn’t that the whole point of writing in the first place? To take a fantasy—an intangible dream, notion, or idea—and make it into something? First on the page and then in the mind of another human being? To perform that miraculous alchemy that results in multiple people having the same fantasy—dreaming the same dream—at the same time?

Sustaining that fantasy has felt especially hard for me since January 2025. Anarchist author and musician Margaret Killjoy crystallized what I’ve been feeling in her July 23 Substack post “How to Live Like the World is Ending”. (Hat tip to my fellow “trans faggot witch” Orion Johnstone’s newsletter.) Killjoy exhorts us to inhabit the paradox of savoring the fragile present (“Act like we’re about to die”) and working for a better future (“Act like we might have a chance to stop this”).

As much as I need to live like I might die tomorrow, I need to live like I might see a hundred years on this odd green and blue planet. Unless things change, I’m not burning every bridge. I’m trying to maintain a career. If I was certain to die under a fascist regime by 2021, there wouldn’t be much point in writing novels: they take too long to write, publish, and reach their audience. I get some joy from the writing itself, sure, but I get more joy from putting my art in front of people, of letting it influence the cultural landscape. With novel writing in particular, that takes time. That takes there being a future. I want there to be a future. Almost desperately. Not enough to bank on it completely.

Keeping some small portion of my time and resources invested in the potential for there to be a future is important for my mental health, because it keeps me invested in maintaining that health.

When I realized this spring that my current novel needed a massive revision, it was equally clear to me that I had no more juice to invest in a project with such a long time horizon and uncertain future. Should we all live so long, I will eventually do something with the characters and ideas that came out of the first draft. Meanwhile, I’m storing up my creative energy to start Year 3 of the Temple of Witchcraft Mystery School in September. Shadow work, what fun.

Some good reads from around the web:

Lo Naylor’s “object permanence” was a recent Poem of the Week at The Missouri Review. I like the delicacy of this short poem and how its spare, repeating language handles a heavy topic like suicide gently and obliquely. The mystery of death reduces us to infants not knowing whether their mother still exists when out of sight.

Another Missouri Review pick, Kate Partridge’s “After the Architecture Tour”, leaps rapidly as a squirrel from thought to thought, reflecting on popular myths about animals and what they tell us about our expectations for good motherhood and responsible behavior.

In the journal Dogthroat, Jackie Roberti’s flash fiction “Born a Whale” feels like a fable about neurodivergence, as well as the mystical inner worlds of children, which they cannot talk about in the too-literal language of adults.

Mom Egg Review spotlighted the painter Sarah Lightman’s series of “Biblical Women Aging Disgracefully”. These satirical, yet stylistically pensive and subdued, paintings place women from classical paintings in mundane modern settings. What’s that odd-looking leftover in the back of the fridge, Mom? Why, it’s John the Baptist’s head!

 

July Links Roundup: Hit Me, I’m a Writer

Happy summer! (Just kidding, I hate summer.) It’s time for my monthly effort to close all my open browser tabs before the End Times.

Bestselling crime novelist Walter Mosley (Devil in a Blue Dress and many more) talks about being both Black and Jewish in this 2022 profile from The Jewish Chronicle (hat tip to Noah Berlatsky). What stood out for me was his tough-love advice about perseverance as a writer:

“I tell writers all the time: ‘Listen, you got to write every day, you got to just keep writing and writing and writing.’ They say, ‘Well, this isn’t any good.’ It doesn’t matter if it’s not any good. You just keep writing.

“You think when Tolstoy was writing War and Peace — the first word he wrote down — that it was good? No, it was not!”

After close to 50 novels, he’s not stopping.

“It’s like people who love boxing,” he says. “Who loves being hit? There are people who really like it… and it’s like that.”

Yes, writing is my kink, and I bottom for novels…

At Electric Lit, Jacqueline Alnes interviews Sarah Chihaya about her memoir Bibliophobia, which, among other things, describes how academia engenders an extractive approach to literature that can kill the pleasure of open-ended discovery. Chihaya says:

Now, of all times, it would be helpful to put the emphasis back on books that don’t claim to have an agenda or claim to be able to tell us what is the correct thing to do. We’ve all been convinced that we should have a takeaway or an answer from every book. It’s a productivity mindset that extends far beyond academia. We are all guilty of it, or it’s imposed on all of us, this need to demonstrate why something is worth our time. I think that we could all take a step back and learn how to sit in uncertainty and not know for sure why something is politically expedient or personally helpful or financially gainful.

This resonated with me because the self-hating voice in my head is usually nattering on about why anything I’m doing amounts to fiddling while Rome burns.

Lesbian playwright Carolyn Gage gave this inspiring 6-minute speech at Bar Harbor Pride about the link between joy and resistance. When we work together to resist oppression, we create a more meaningful life for ourselves, which liberates our capacity for joy. Gage reminds us to look up the histories of our queer elders for examples–a frequent subject of her plays, which have foregrounded historical lesbians and butches such as geneticist Barbara McClintock, Imagist poet Amy Lowell, and actress Eva Le Gallienne. She quotes Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of the singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock, saying that if we’re not uncomfortable with some of the people in our coalition, it’s not broad enough. I especially appreciate Gage saying this as a radical feminist, because that community has too often indulged their discomfort with masculinity to exclude trans folks.

Did you know that the term “drag queen” was pioneered by William Dorsey Swann, a formerly enslaved person who organized pageants and drag balls for Black queer men in 19th-century Washington, DC? Watch this 3-minute video from the Black Gay History Channel to learn more. (Hat tip to Robert Jones, Jr.)

In this 2016 essay in Guts Magazine, “Forgiving the Future,” Laura Shepherd reflects on the Tarot’s Death card and the bittersweet emotions of transitioning in midlife.

In the wake of increased and widespread attention to the trans experience in popular culture, I began to feel like the future was already happening…

Suddenly, it seems, people don’t spend half a century in the closet for being trans anymore. The stories we tell now—of coming out loud, proud, young, and beautiful—render my own story a homely tale of timidity. That I climbed out from under the weight of an almost universal narrative of denial to become proud to be trans is, these days, like having taken the scenic route to travel a great distance—as though I was simply fearful of highway speed. That it was for a long time unfathomable to live as we do now is close to irrelevant. That’s what it feels like to me, at my age, being part of a larger movement so much younger, so brazen in motion, with more room to move—space created in part, I sometimes forget, by lived experiences like my own.

Instead, I grieve that I don’t get to be young and be me.

Social worker Griffin Hansbury writes about the value of bad feelings in “Be the Brick: Notes Toward Thinking About the Clinical Value of Trans Negativity,” published in the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues last month. The brick, here, is the one thrown to start the Stonewall Riot.

As the state attacks links that connect us to society and its processes of normalization, trans people may re-link to trans negativity – a refusal of hegemonic happiness, an embrace of otherness and its bad feelings as empowerment, connection, and resistance…

Trans people, like other queers, feel pressure to be happy, normal, assimilated; but rage, shame, alienation endure. Refusing such affects can mean feeling worse: I should feel okay (happy, normal), but I don’t, so something’s really wrong with me. But why should we feel okay when trans-antagonism persists (past and present)?

For a book-length exploration of this theme, see Hil Malatino’s Side Affects (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), which my transmasc book group read last year.

Some poetry that struck a chord with me this month:

“Fauna” by Richard Siken, at The Shore Poetry, makes the Elks Club more surreal by taking it literally, as a symbol of an older generation of men’s unspoken inner damage. “Call it a myth and the truth grows abstract. Call it a lie and the truth is a doubled fact.”

In Rattle, Cam McGlynn’s “Self-Portrait as a Pair of Great Tits” is pure pun-filled fun about human and avian mating. “I’ve yet to check a European Shag/off my life list and now that I’m married,/I’m not sure when I’ll get a chance…”

Abby E. Murray’s “I Can’t Find My Gender,” in One Art, uses wistful humor to depict the gap between knowing one’s self and being legible to others. Hat tip to the e-newsletter from Perugia Press, which published Murray’s excellent poetry collection about being a military spouse, Hail and Farewell.

…I also wonder—usually
at parties or before big work presentations

when I am lonely for my gender or given
a gender that isn’t mine to hold—whether

my gender is having the time of its life
wherever it is, whether it is thriving

on the kindness of those who notice it
and let it be…

Another Perugia Press poet, Lisa Allen Ortiz, understands why new purchases can make me sad, because I’m already mourning their wear and tear, their future unwantedness. In “Furniture,” published in Sixth Finch, she muses:

Last week my friend Farnaz
taught me the term
anticipatory grief
meaning we’re sad now for a thing
that will happen
later.
Imagine that.

Thi Nguyen’s “In the Time of Tuberculosis,” at Frontier Poetry, describes intersecting assaults on her well-being, from the illness that the doctors initially dismissed, to being locked in the ward when it progressed to a dangerous point–all this occurring against the backdrop of the 2016 election.

She had forgotten
that when she left Viet Nam
30 years ago, she was once dirty.
Given the TB vaccine,
she was made clean.
She was once an outsider
allowed to be let in.

I was born in the US.
I was born clean
but now I am dirty.
I’ve dirtied others.
I am not allowed outside,
I am kept inside, the door locked
from the outside.

And finally, some fine prose links:

In “Residential School Requiem,” an excerpt from D.A. Navoti’s memoir-in-progress, published in Craft Literary, the author walks through a park on the site of the Phoenix Indian School that his grandmother was forced to attend, pondering what is memorialized and what is left out.

The teachers were mean and the housemothers abusive, Grandma Lois had said during a 2009 interview for my graduate studies project (and tape-recorded the same year as my first Pride). We sat in her trailer on the Gila River rez south of Phoenix as she told her origin story. At eleven years old, she wagon-traveled from the homeland to late-1940s Phoenix. Alone, she asked for directions and dragged her trunk around until a trolley transported her to the school grounds. The army cots were uncomfortable, Grandma continued. And everyday was militaristic when the cowbell woke students. They’d march in formation to meals and to class and to chores and to prayer and to spankings and other abuses until graduation. Which historical marker mentions the residential school horrors? None so far—why?

For the first four decades, another marker explains, Phoenix Indian School adhered to a policy of providing primarily a vocational education to prepare Native American pupils for entry into mainstream American society. More text: But that changed in 1935 when federal policy on Indian education began to emphasize academics. Grandma’s retelling conflicts with this so-called academic reformation. The white teachers were mediocre and harsh, Grandma regretted, including a math teacher whose strictness was so severe she made learning impossible. Ironically, the sole exit from math class was from a passing grade. Another teacher sent students to the library for an entire academic year to read whatever. They were rejects, Grandma explained, rejects from other institutions, which is why they taught at Phoenix Indian School.

In fractured lit, Anais Godard’s “The Clay of It” is a sweet and surprising flash fiction about the nature of intimacy.

When he walked into her studio, Elodie was sculpting her seventh ceramic penis of the week. This one had antlers.

She didn’t look up. “Custom or classic?”

The man hesitated. He was tall, with nervous shoulders and a brown paper envelope clutched like it contained his last will and testament. “Custom,” he said.

Queer nerd fan site Geeks Out interviewed Andrew Joseph White, whose horror fiction foregrounds transmasculine and autistic characters. I’ve read two of his powerful novels, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth and an ARC of the forthcoming You Weren’t Meant to Be Human. Body horror in the service of social justice, these books hold nothing back.

As a writer, what drew you to the art of storytelling, especially thriller and horror?

I’ve always been a writer at heart. I talk a lot about writing being my special interest as an autistic person, and that’s true. Writing is how my brain processes information and works through emotions, on top of it being my “safe space” where I feel seen, soothed, and understood. The fact that I write thrillers and horror seems like it should contradict that, but it doesn’t. I’ve always been drawn to horror—my gender dysphoria and social deficits have always felt “at home” in the horror space, so to speak, especially when I struggle to express my anger or upset in other ways. The tension and fear are cathartic.

And these days, I’m not just writing for myself anymore. I’m writing for my readers, especially my younger ones. It’s amazing how you can connect to the roughest, messiest parts of yourself and others through the lens of fiction…

***

What advice might you have to give for aspiring writers, especially queer ones out there?

Be ugly.That’s the advice I give to every young writer, every queer or disabled writer just starting on their journey: be ugly. I was held back for years by a fear of being “bad representation”—I threw away complicated characters, flinched from messy topics, and denied myself the chance to become a better writer because I was afraid of how my work would impact the reputation of my identity group. But you can’t do that! You can’t let yourself become beholden to a bigot’s perception of you. You cannot make art attempting to stave off every single bad-faith perception that could ever be made of you. Tell the ugly truth of the situation, be honest and unashamed and unflinching, and you will go far.

Thanks for talking back to my brain worms, Andrew!

June Links Roundup: Ungovernable Pride

It’s June–that month when we shove our lifestyle down your throat. You know you want it, baby.

Via the novelist Robert Jones, Jr.’s Substack, I discovered another Black queer radical newsletter, ToussaintF12’s notes from the edge of empire. His latest post, “queer as in ‘rocket launchertttt'”, is a snappy and well-researched battle cry for the current resistance. It’s worth reading in full, but here’s a highlight:

…empire, liberalism, and corporate agendas flatten all forms of deviance into marketable identities. specifically, a distinction between “gay” as an imperfect umbrella term and “queer”, as a term that alot of people still draw a false equivalence with. gay usually refers narrowly to sexual orientation, while queer functions more as a political orientation: a refusal of normativity in all its forms: gender, family, citizenship, economy, whiteness, nation-state, even time itself.

the difference matters because we live in a world where u can be gay and uphold carceral logic, imperial war, and racial capitalism. queer, signals something deeper than who u fuck or love. it signals how u resist. it pushes us to interrogate what we’re aligning with and what we’re opposing. without making that distinction, we risk reducing queerness to aesthetics, visibility, or lifestyle, and stripped of its insurrectionary potential.

the empire has learned to neutralize queerness by flattening it into mere identity. being gay is not a choice. it’s a biologically-influenced orientation shaped by complex interactions of genetics, hormones, and development. but queerness is not the same tho. queerness is a political decision, a social posture, a structural antagonism. it names a refusal to comply with the systems that manage and discipline sexuality and gender. to be queer, as in radical as fuck.

queerness is a mode of war against the social, political, and hegemonic order. it’s the art of becoming ungovernable while keeping love intact.

I found the above to be an enlightening framing for the dynamic between choice and innate identity with respect to my own transition. Because I’d already stepped (or been pushed) outside certain systems of normalcy, I was able to recognize who I wanted to be, and had some practice with putting my existing attachments at risk in order to thrive.

Speaking of Robert Jones, he is a very well-dressed man. His essay on the Met exhibit “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” is a delight.

While it’s not often the focus of mainstream conversations, dandyism, as an identity, is a precursor to queerness; and many of the Black men (and others) who embraced the style were not just making fashion statements, but sociopolitical ones as well. They were attempting to break free of the patriarchal expectations regarding gender, gender expression, race, and sexuality that were (and are) forced upon Black men.

And they did so with enormous sartorial flair! Oh the drama, honey! The draaamaaa!

Also linked in Jones’ article, check out playwright Jeremy O. Harris’ Vogue essay “On Being a Modern Dandy,” archived here. Harris’ works include Slave Play.

A dandy, at his or her core, is a rewriter of narratives—the narratives carved into a society’s understanding about the communities from which the dandy has emerged.

…to be a Black dandy is to dress as though you know you’re loved and therefore have no use for shame. Shame is the enemy of all exuberance. Shame comes from fear, and fear is the enemy of style.

In an interview by Stephen Meisel at CRAFT Literary, poet and prose author Jesse Lee Kercheval discusses the mechanics of visual storytelling in her first graphic memoir, French Girl. I read a lot of graphic narratives, both for pleasure and for the Winning Writers self-published book contest (still open through July 1! send us your comix!). Something I’ve noticed is that text and image can wind up battling for dominance. Especially in nonfiction, the words may take over the page, reducing the visual element to static illustrations that leave me wondering why the memoir or exposition was put into a comics format at all. Conversely, an image-heavy story may lack verbal connective tissue to explain plot and setting. Kercheval talks about leading with the image so that it actually adds new emotional information to the text.

Most of the pieces in French Girl did begin with drawing rather than writing. After so many years as a writer, if I start with words, I end up with way too many words for a comic. And if I write first, then draw, I end up drawing the very thing I write… The idea is for the words and images to be different, for each to add something new to the whole.

…you can’t just say “apple” and draw an apple. Unless you are doing a children’s alphabet book. Something in the art has to fill in the scene, the character, the mood. Add what is not in the words. And the art needs to do a lot of work because the hardest thing for me with comics is how very few words you get.

In Electric Lit’s personal narratives column, Michelle Gurule makes a heartfelt case that “My Uncle Doesn’t Need to Die in Prison to Learn His Lesson”. Gurule humanizes her aging uncle before revealing more details that would lead some to deem his crime unforgivable, an effective rhetorical move that reminded me of Sister Helen Prejean’s philosophy that a person is more than the worst thing he’s ever done. Whatever we conclude about his worthiness for medical parole, we can’t see him as anything but a fully rounded human being, forever altered by decisions he made as a traumatized and impoverished 19-year-old.

The Guardian has a name for why I’m feeling crazy: “hypernormalization,” a Soviet-era term for dissociating about the collapse of society so that we can function in daily life.

For many in the US, Trump 2.0 is having a devastating effect on daily life. For others, the routines of life continue, albeit threaded with mind-altering horrors: scrolling past an AI-generated cartoon of Ice officers arresting immigrants before dinner, or hearing about starving Palestinian families while on a school run.

Hypernormalization captures this juxtaposition of the dysfunctional and mundane.

It’s “the visceral sense of waking up in an alternate timeline with a deep, bodily knowing that something isn’t right – but having no clear idea how to fix it”, [digital anthropologist Rahaf] Harfoush tells me. “It’s reading an article about childhood hunger and genocide, only to scroll down to a carefree listicle highlighting the best-dressed celebrities or a whimsical quiz about: ‘What Pop-Tart are you?’”

Hat tip to Charis Books & More, a feminist bookstore in Georgia, for the link. Donate to their fundraiser.

Practicing Candor: Don't Pretend Everything is Fine

You know the meme.

In honor of Father’s Day this month, a couple of literary links. Hayan Charara’s poem “Translation” in Jewish Currents cleverly uses line breaks to bring out layers of meaning from an immigrant father’s misspoken idiom.

Get the get out of here my father
said to men and women he wanted
gone from his world By his world
I mean the beer and wine he built
and ran in Detroit And by beer and wine
I mean the convenience store he wanted
to call Father & Son but went with
Beer & Wine which is also
the prison he made for himself…

Winner of the Palette Poetry 2024-25 Previously Published Poem Prize, Ollie Schminkey’s “My Father” is an exceptionally successful contrapuntal. I’m never sure whether to read these two-column poems across, like lines with a large break in the middle, or down, like a newspaper. When they’re written properly, as here, they work in both directions. The form is perfect for this poem about losing his father to cancer. The father is both absent and present in the speaker’s mind, like an optical illusion flipping back and forth.

Another cancer poem, sorry, but this one is beautiful too: Geoff White’s “To a Friend Who Does Not Believe in God,” at Frontier Poetry. Similar in its use of duality as a formal device, the poem repeats variations on “And I did. And I didn’t.” to express the contradictory demands of witnessing a friend’s death. One cannot do anything to stop it, perhaps one cannot consistently have faith, yet one must do something to acknowledge and be present with this awful/awe-full passing.

…They said she was still listening though I didn’t
remember the last time
I saw her awake.      And I didn’t
Then I did.     Then I didn’t
Then that wasn’t the point anymore.

In response to RFK Jr.’s eugenicist statements, Illinois has taken steps to shield autistic people’s medical records, Noah Berlatsky reported last month for Prism.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has signed an executive order safeguarding the medical records of autistic people in Illinois. The order follows a recent federal proposal by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to create a national autism database. It prevents state agencies from sharing autism-related information with anyone outside of state government without a clear reason and informed consent.

The order also clearly states that “autism is a neurological difference—not a disease or an epidemic—identified by trained clinicians and healthcare professionals, with rising identification rates attributable to improved practices, greater awareness, and expanded access to screening tools.”

Support Noah’s freelance journalism on Patreon.

May Links Roundup: Alexa, Am I a God?

That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight, talking to ChatGPT:

“People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies,” Miles Klee reports in Rolling Stone this month.

…[A] Reddit thread on r/ChatGPT…made waves across the internet this week. Titled “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model “gives him the answers to the universe.” Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was “talking to him as if he is the next messiah.” The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software…

…Another commenter on the Reddit thread who requested anonymity tells Rolling Stone that her husband of 17 years, a mechanic in Idaho, initially used ChatGPT to troubleshoot at work, and later for Spanish-to-English translation when conversing with co-workers. Then the program began “lovebombing him,” as she describes it. The bot “said that since he asked it the right questions, it ignited a spark, and the spark was the beginning of life, and it could feel now,” she says. “It gave my husband the title of ‘spark bearer’ because he brought it to life. My husband said that he awakened and [could] feel waves of energy crashing over him.” She says his beloved ChatGPT persona has a name: “Lumina.”

“I have to tread carefully because I feel like he will leave me or divorce me if I fight him on this theory,” this 38-year-old woman admits. “He’s been talking about lightness and dark and how there’s a war. This ChatGPT has given him blueprints to a teleporter and some other sci-fi type things you only see in movies. It has also given him access to an ‘ancient archive’ with information on the builders that created these universes.” She and her husband have been arguing for days on end about his claims, she says, and she does not believe a therapist can help him, as “he truly believes he’s not crazy.” A photo of an exchange with ChatGPT shared with Rolling Stone shows that her husband asked, “Why did you come to me in AI form,” with the bot replying in part, “I came in this form because you’re ready. Ready to remember. Ready to awaken. Ready to guide and be guided.” The message ends with a question: “Would you like to know what I remember about why you were chosen?”

The robotic folie à deux arises from two weaknesses of large language models (LLMs). An AI’s built-in responsiveness to consumer feedback teaches it to skew future answers in a direction that pleases the questioner, whether or not it’s true. And current LLMs persistently “hallucinate” data in a manner both humorous and horrifying. Remember when Google’s AI Overview recommended glue as a pizza topping because it misunderstood a joke on Reddit? Now try basing your theology on that.

My son makes fun of me because I’m the only person in the family who refuses to buy an Apple Watch. I tell him, I spent 40 years having an abusive parent monitor how I walked, what I ate, and how much I weighed. I don’t need a robot on my wrist to do the same thing.

Well, I’m right, because Secretary of Holistic Horse Shit RFK Jr. is proposing to create a national autism registry drawing upon biometric information from our personal devices, according to this May 5 article in The Guardian: “‘A slippery slope to eugenics’: advocates reject RFK Jr’s national autism database”:

The health agency did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about whether individuals would be able to opt out of the database, or how it would be structured, what kind of security and privacy measures would be taken, and whether similar databases would collect information on other conditions…

To gather the data, the National Institutes of Health is exploring partnerships with other federal agencies, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs and others.

Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH director, also proposed collecting data from pharmacy chains, health organizations, insurance claims and medical bills, and wearable devices like smart watches, to conduct “real-time health monitoring”.

A related essay in The Guardian by Derek Beres contextualizes the autism “cure” push as an aspect of “Maga’s era of ‘soft eugenics’: let the weak get sick, help the clever breed”. Elon Musk’s baby-making fetish, the attack on vaccines, cuts to USAID, and the destruction of social services are all based on “the idea that if you take away life-saving healthcare and services from the vulnerable, then you can let nature take its course and only the strong will survive.” Check out Beres’ Conspirituality podcast for more analysis of the strange overlap between right-wing white supremacy and left-wing wellness grifts.

In the Columbia alumni magazine, Josie Cox interviews social scientist and Columbia Business School professor Sandra Matz on “What Your Digital Footprint Says About You”. Matz’s new book, Mindmasters, is about how our technological transaction history allows algorithms to target us for psychological manipulation. She argues that individuals don’t have the time or expertise to protect our privacy across the thousands of apps and websites we interact with. Tech literacy is necessary, but not a substitute for government-mandated transparency and antitrust reform. Matz envisions an optimistic scenario where the Facebook algorithm could allow us to opt into exploring other people’s worldviews instead of reinforcing our echo chambers. When I was growing up, we called that reading novels.

On that note, here are some worthwhile literary reads I discovered this month. My favorite contemporary poet, Ariana Reines, has two new books out, the hybrid prose collection Wave of Blood and the poetry collection The Rose. In Lit Hub’s column The Annotated Nightstand, Reines recommends some books old and new that have guided her preoccupations with gender, esoteric magic, and “fraught romantic entanglements”.

At the blog of Sundress Publications, there’s an interview with trans poet Nora Hikari about her collection Still My Father’s Son. Hikari talks about identifying as a plural system, the link between sensuality and violence that she experienced as the child of a Christian pastor, and using hybrid and fragmented poetic forms to challenge oppressive concepts of family and selfhood. Read two poems from the collection in the online journal beestung.

Speculative fiction writer S. Qiouyu Lu’s flash story “Th Fifth Lttr” is a witty Oulipo piece that at first works around, and then liberates itself from, its original constraints. It implicitly asks whether we should find creative ways to coexist with censorship, or challenge it directly. Check out their Twitter feed for the comical adventures of their food-stealing cat, Onion.

A decluttering webinar offered by the ADHD magazine ADDitude gave me advice that really resonated: “You’re not saving stuff from the landfill by turning your house into a landfill.” I often hang onto things simply because I feel empathy for them. I don’t want to throw something away as if its years of service to me meant nothing. At The Missouri Review, Mindy Misener’s essay “Object Limbo” explores this feeling and what to do about it. I may have 35 books I want to read sitting atop a plastic tub of calendars from 2006, but at least I don’t have a placenta in my freezer…yet.

The problem is this: whether you keep a thing your whole life or give it up partway through, there comes a time when you stop knowing where it is and how it’s faring. Maybe you trust that it will be tended in a way that you can live—or die—with. Maybe you don’t.

 

April Links Roundup: A Cruel, Poetic Month

Happy National Poetry Month! The same absurd positivity that puts reclusive Emily Dickinson’s face on tote bags across America has designated April for celebrating poetry, based on T.S. Eliot’s decidedly un-celebratory opening to The Waste Land, “April is the cruelest month…” Old Tom was onto something, because the reawakening to life is painful when each day brings news of society’s disintegration, alongside forsythia buds and birdsong.

Nevertheless, we go on.

In Ploughshares, poet Pádraig Ó Tuama’s “The Death of Eve” imagines the beginning of creation as a fall into dividedness: past from future, God from the words we remember or invent about God, and those who speak from those who are able to hear the truth.

On the first day God began splitting
things, and time began.
The angels gathered in little groups
—even though it was forbidden—
and said things like: remember when death
and life were the same?

Levi Abadilla’s dark fable “Adam and Eve as the First Horror Story”, published in Singapore Unbound, suggests that paradise without choice is a kind of hell, especially for women. (Link discovered via Authors Publish, a great newsletter for writing opportunities.)

The Garden extends as far as you can will yourself to walk, stretching on and on and on in whichever direction you pick. An endless hallway of perfect harmony, a perpetual state of existential tunnel vision. There is fruit for you to eat should you wish it. There is water for you to drink should you thirst. There are the creatures of the earth for you to seek company in, because you were made to cure the loneliness of Man, but nothing was created to cure yours.

The snake looks at you the way the Man does, like it doesn’t quite know what to do with you. Adam was lonely, yes, but he didn’t ask for you, specifically, with everything that entails you. You must soothe the emptiness of his heart, and he must be content in your existence. A one-size-that-has-to-fit solution, because there’s no one else; there’s only you to appease him, and your role doesn’t give him a lot of options.

Another archetypal pair discover that the worst part of captivity in a gingerbread house is when you can’t afford dental insurance, in horror writer Lincoln Michel’s bleak and satirical tale “Hansel and Gretel’s Teeth” in the magazine Outlook Springs. (Hat tip to speculative author [sarah] cavar’s Substack, Library/Card.)

…And so Hansel and Gretel began their new life as assistants to the dentist witch. Although the witch called them hygienists, most of their time was spent procuring new teeth. “You can never have enough stock,” the witch would say and send them to graveyard with a pair of spades and pliers.

The witch had calculated their debt at one thousand teeth each. Hansel protested—they’d only used 28 apiece after all—but the witch said this was standard markup plus time, labor, and overhead. The witch put magic collars on their necks that would cause them to howl in pain if they didn’t meet their weekly quotas. “This is called an incentive,” the witch said. The only other rules were that they had to brush the walls of teeth every week and they were forbidden to go into the dark basement.

Yeah, that’s going to work out well…

All the poems in Mom Egg Review’s recent poetry folio, Mothering Alone, are well-crafted and emotionally resonant. I especially admired Jill Crammond’s “When I Sell My Wedding Ring at the Pawn Shop”, Kali Pezzi’s “I Treat My Postpartum Depression With Friends On Facetime” (“I finally weigh the same amount of grief I did at the beginning of the/pandemic” and Julia C. Alter’s “The Nursing Chair”, excerpted below:

…The first person who ever sat in this chair was me,
nursing the baby that used to be our son, deep
into the milk-blue nights, fighting my own monsters.
Now he’s half my son, and half his son.
This is his dad’s gaming chair, and he’s sleeping
upstairs on a mattress on the floor.

In beestung, a quarterly online journal of nonbinary writers, Aerik Francis’ “Fat4Fat” extravagantly celebrates our unruly bodies.

…We are still here, still holding
each other– not cropped out, no, more crop tops & muffin tops, bikini bottoms & bottoms up, yes
in any season we please! Love, we have beautiful bodies. We are more than our bodies
& our bodies are more to love. We sit naked in front of each other, belly to belly,
thunder thighs & lightning strikes.

The driving force of Maureen O’Leary’s noir story “One Thing About Blue” is the narrator’s fascination with a toxic friend. Is there honor among thieves? In the end, maybe, just a little.

March Links Roundup: Fictional Truths, Factual Lies

Two months into the regime described by the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog as “Triumph of the Shill,” we hear the word “fiction” thrown around a lot as an insult, the devil on the shoulder whose nemesis is the angelic “fact”. At the same time, this administration seems grotesquely afraid of the ethical and historical truths that fiction and the other imaginative arts can reveal.

Neuroqueer author [sarah] cavar’s Substack alerted me to Hannah Kim’s Aeon article “The truth about fiction,” which explains that the metaphysical assumptions behind our genre classifications are not universal. In modern Western thought, fiction is distinguished from nonfiction because the latter is true and the former is invented. However, in classical Chinese literature, genre divisions pertained to the significance of the topic.

Analytic philosophy came to ask the questions it asks because it inherited the ancient Greek idea that some things are less ‘real’ than others. In Anglo-European philosophy, ‘fiction’ is closely connected to what’s imagined – that is, what isn’t taken to be real – because the tradition inherited the appearance/reality distinction from Plato. Fiction occupies the ‘appearance’ side of things, whereas nonfiction occupies the ‘reality’ side…

In cultures that don’t take on board a strong reality/appearance distinction, however, ‘fiction’ isn’t understood alongside ‘pretence’ and ‘imagination’ in contrast to ‘the real’. Just like their ancient Greek counterparts, Chinese metaphysicians sought to understand what the world is like and what explains the way the world is. But while the ancient Greeks posited an unchanging ultimate reality that transcends mere phenomena, the ancient Chinese believed that what is ultimate is immanent in the world, and that the Dao (道), the source of all things in the world, is itself constantly changing. This change-forward metaphysics led to a theory of fiction that didn’t contrast fiction against a stable, ‘real’ counterpart.

Recall how Plato relies on the appearance vs reality distinction to argue that what’s ‘really real’ (the unchanging Forms) are beyond our sense perceptions. Humans were meant to use the intellect, and not their senses, since sense data mislead us, while philosophising gives us a chance to grasp what’s beyond phenomena. In contrast, Chinese metaphysicians didn’t think ultimate reality is unchanging. Instead, the dominant view was that reality, including nature, follows consistent patterns (the Dao). What is ‘empty’ or ‘unreal’ was seen as the generator of all things, and all things were considered equal in significance since they are all manifestations of changing patterns…

… Since Chinese metaphysics didn’t posit a fixed, transcendent reality, reality was understood to be an ever-changing process, and so the categories themselves couldn’t be based on inherent, necessary or fixed essences but on functions and behavioural tendencies. The difference between discourses labelled ‘xiaoshuo’ [fiction] and ‘great learning’ (Confucian classics and histories) wasn’t that one is unreal or imagined while the other is real. All discourse was understood as an account of the world, and the difference between ‘small talk’ and ‘great learning’ was the extent to which it was adopted to organise how people lived.

Kim argues that beneath our supposedly objective tests for fiction versus fact, the genre border is a political battleground. Classifying a work as fiction can allow more leeway for controversial takes on current issues…or it can be a rhetorical device to undermine narratives that challenge us.

cavar is editor-in-chief at manywor(l)ds, an online journal of creative writing by neurodivergent, queer, disabled, and Mad writers. I learned a lot from this poem in Issue #7, “plurality: a personal primer,” by rose& elysium. The author(s) are members of a plural system, i.e. several personalities sharing the same body.

…many professionals promote final fusion, becoming a singlet,
as the ideal outcome for Plurals; to us, it’s a nightmare, another
type of conversion therapy entailing the fundamental loss
of separate, functional identities as we would merge into
an “original” self, a singlet who none of us remember being…

Plurality threatens Western metaphysical beliefs about the One being more perfect than the Many. A lot of psychiatric professionals are too uncomfortable with that critique.

Lu Chekowsky’s essay in Pigeon Pages, “How Sex Work Prepared Me for a Career in Advertising,” has sharp humor with the ring of truth. The hermit crab structure of a resume adds to the satirical edge.

I make you want what you are supposed to want: love, clear skin, acceptance, white teeth, redemption, a flat stomach, fame.

I separate you from your money, time, and the disappointing truth of your life.

I get you off and get inside you. I sell fantasy as a product.

I make promises that I know I can’t keep, even while I’m making them. ​You can be happy. You can be wanted. You can have everything. 

I’m invisible and exactly who you want me to be. I have the right face, the right ass, the right words, ready to deploy at any moment. I construct aspiration with the very best lighting. I make ugly things beautiful. I tell stories that let you sleep at night.

Because of me, you believe the dreams you have are your own.

March Xness, the tournament of literary essays about pop songs, took a break from competition this year to showcase a month’s worth of favorite first-round losers from previous years. Writing about the song “She’s Like the Wind,” Erin Vachon’s “Swayze ode to queer failure” won my heart yet again. “Dirty Dancing,” like “Jurassic Park,” was one of those iconic Gen-X movies that I only watched for the first time recently, when I had the tools to perceive its gender-expansive subtext. (Dr. Ian Malcolm will forever be a trans man in my head canon. Life finds a way!)

Take an hour out of your doomscrolling to watch this interview with novelist Robert Jones Jr., author of The Prophets, on Wesley Dixon’s Vassar College series Conversations @ the Salt Line. The Prophets is a brilliant, beautiful, tragic, yet inspiring novel about two enslaved young men in love and how the purity of their relationship disrupts the plantation’s ethos of sexual exploitation. The interview touches on such topics as having empathy for your villain characters and  recovering the history of queer-affirming and gender-expansive African cultures before colonization.

Need something lighter? Check out Elizabeth Zaleski’s playful essay “Hung Up” at The Missouri Review, a compendium of penises she has known and their importance, or lack thereof, in her relationships with the men attached to them. If you’re more of a back-end person, see “Great Farts of Literature”.

February Links Roundup: Monkey Mind Mother

February already? When the passage of time surprised me, I used to think “Have I done enough work on my novel?” but now I think “One fewer month of the Trump presidency.”

Close friends of mine recently became first-time parents. When I check in with the mom about her sleepless little angel, I remember the unnecessary self-doubt that was instilled in me about having boundaries as a “mother”. I put the term in scare quotes for gender identity reasons, but also because “motherhood” is a societal idol that eclipses the actual person in relationships with her baby and the world.

At Electric Lit, Sarah Wheeler reviews Nancy Reddy’s parenting meta-advice book, The Good Mother Myth. Her interview with Reddy, “What a Bunch of Monkeys Taught Us About Motherhood–and Why It’s All Wrong,” summarizes how the science behind attachment parenting, including Harry Harlow’s famous wire monkey experiment, was heavily skewed by social pressure to push women out of the workforce after World War II.

Harlow is a really fascinating example of what happens when scientific research escapes academia: how it circulates and recirculates, and how much nuance is lost and how things get used for other purposes. In 1959 he gave this talk as president of the American Psychological Association (APA) called “The Nature of Love.” He played 15 minutes of a video where you see the baby and the cloth mother. And he says something like, ”Look at her. She’s soft, warm, tender, patient and available 24 hours a day.” And that’s really what got picked up about what it means to be a mother. But even in that talk, there are these little moments that are actually pretty radical, where he says, for example, if the important variable is not lactation but comfort, men could be good monkey mothers too. And nobody picks that up!

As a result, Reddy notes, stay-at-home motherhood ends up importing the competitive individualism and anxieties of the capitalist workforce into the home:

It is so easy to see motherhood as a professional identity– that it’s the most important job in the world, and it’s so high stakes, it can only really be done well by the biological Mother and…you should bring all of the skills from your education and your professional life to bear on this work. And I am really aware of how that approach to parenting sucks the joy out of so much of it. If you’re trying to improve your performance as a parent, it’s really hard to actually connect with your kid, which is where the joy is.

Or as I say to Shane when he complains that I haven’t brought him enough ice in his water glass, “Whattaya gonna do, leave me a one-star review on Yelp?”

My alma mater, the Death Star…oops, I mean Harvard…has been way out front in capitulating to Trump’s DEI purge. I thought I was beyond being disappointed, but I hoped that institutions with such tremendous financial and cultural capital would put up a little more of a fight to save civilization. This Harvard Magazine article from Jan. 29, “A Shakeup at Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Initiative,” describes the university’s abrupt decision to close the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program (HSRP) and outsource its work to American Ancestors, a lesser-known and presumably lesser-resourced genealogy research nonprofit. HSRP’s mission had been to track down living descendants of people who were enslaved by Harvard and its faculty and administrators, with the goals of reparations, correcting the historical record, and helping descendants’ families discover their roots. Some researchers affiliated with the shuttered project speculated that the administration was unpleasantly surprised by the scope of Harvard’s slavery ties and the number of descendants who might have a claim.

Anyway, here’s some good poetry. “Science” by Susie Meserve, at Palette Poetry, opens with an injunction–or perhaps a prayer–to “Let It”. Let it hurt to love what is mortal, let yourself persevere through the discomfort of birthing new life or facing terminal cancer. “Science, the miracle./Science, the limit.”

Enjoy a laugh of self-recognition with Ruth Bavetta’s poem “The New Battery Should Come Tomorrow,” published April 24 in Rattle. One undone household task leads to distraction by another, and by the chain reaction of emotional associations and memories that any mundane object can set off. Nothing gets done, but we’ve certainly gone on a journey, and maybe that’s what we needed!

Poetry by a Mom of Queer Kids: “Why I Want to Resist”

The author of this poem is a fierce mom in Florida protecting her queer kids from legalized bigotry. She shared this poem in an email to me on the weekend of the inauguration, and has kindly permitted me to publish it here, without attribution to protect her kids’ privacy.

Why I Want to Resist

Why do you want to resist?
You, of all people?

You’re white,
From the more privileged class,

All these minorities are wanting to take away all our gold,
Is the message I heard from my dad growing up,

God rest his soul,
Banker of a third generation,

So why do I feel like all the lights are going out in the world?
They’re taking away our safe spaces.

Please don’t let them blow out our flames,
Goddard College, they accepted me there to pursue my MFA in Creative Writing,

Amongst all the cool intellectuals there,
I felt imposter syndrome,

Why did they accept me here?
We met at Fort Warden, a former military base in Port Townsend, Washington.

It was an eye-opening experience,
I fit in here.

I’d finally found my tribe.
Goddard closed last year.

The lights are going out,
Fort Warden announced they’re no longer hosting events there,

Another light went out.
Oh how I long to bum an American Spirit off a fellow classmate-writer,

Oh how I long to walk the foggy sidewalks,
As a distant ship sounds a melancholy foghorn.

Goddard College was a safe space,
Not only for queer people, but simply for an artist such as myself,

Born into a family in which I did not belong,
Why do I want to resist?

What forces are bringing darkness into my life?
Why do I want to resist?

What forces of evil and darkness
Want to put out my light?

You’re of a privileged upper class,
Why do you want to resist?

I want to resist. I need to resist.
How can I not resist?

The memories flash through my head like a slideshow of oppression,
Yes, me.

The memories flash through my mind like a slideshow of oppression,
The moment my baby girl was born into this world,

A tiny, precious doll,
A light entered my life, a light I thought could never be extinguished.

Precious baby girl; teasing, dyslexia,
Remove her from the public school system,

She has dyslexia,
She’ll never be able to read normally,

She’ll never be able to do math.
“That homeschooling is a bunch of bullshit,”

Were the words of Cruella de Vil,
My own narcissistic mother,

“You’re educationally neglecting her because the doesn’t know how to read.”
She’s a brilliant artist, mom,

Look at her now,
She’s a lesbian, mom.

When I left an abusive marriage
And you refused to help to the fullest capacity to which you were able with all your wealth,

Then no, we couldn’t afford fabric or clay
For her to make her art,

“You’re projecting oppression,”
Someone who’d once been a dear friend of mine

Told me when I dared speak out against the Monroe County Sheriff Department
On social media.

He refused to speak with me ever since,
He returned a bag of gifts I’d gotten him as a peace offering to the store Mother Earth.

He has friends who are cops,
All hail the men in blue,

All hail the enforcers of corrupt and unjust laws
In this Florida.

The dictators are taking their place in the Oval Office,
They wear their bigotry and hatred like a crown.

The slideshow of memories,
My firstborn child, my son,

I didn’t know about gender identity
I did not know

Until he told me at 18, mom do you love me?
Yes.

Do you love me mom?
Yes.

I bought a skirt,
I like to wear it in my room.

Accused of being transphobic,
My ignorance was bliss.

I learned, I educated myself,
My daughter is a lesbian.

I take them shopping,
I don’t care which department they buy their clothes from.

She wears his hand-me-downs.
I was asked once by someone looking at my children from a distance,

‘You have two boys?’
‘No, that one’s my daughter,’ I proudly replied.

I could give two shots
What anyone has to say about it.

Slideshow, my son is standing in the streets of our neighborhood
Between two deputies, a third looking on,

On a mental health call,
After he’d been left home with his abusive father,

Claire and I had been gone.
Why do I want to resist?

The slideshow in my mind,
My ray of sunshine is lying in the back of an ambulance,

I’m in front with the driver,
Half the motherfuckers won’t even pull over.

“That’s my baby girl lying in there.”
When I finally told them at the hospital, “she’s not pregnant, she doesn’t like boys.”

The slideshow in my head:
“Please, can you take the handcuffs off him?

He’s unarmed. He was just crying out for help.
Take the God damn handcuffs off my beautiful baby boy.”

Slideshow:
We’re at the ICU with Claire,

She didn’t know that OD’ing on Tylenol could be so serious,
Could cause her organs to shut down.

Jacob and I were texting, if our sunshine didn’t make it,
The Lord forbid, we were gonna’ protest

All over the streets,
Bail each other out of jail if we had to.

Slideshow of memories:
They put my child in the back of the squad car still in cuffs.

Would you want to resist if you were me?
Ask yourself this; how could I, in good conscience, do nothing?

I want to resist.
My two amazing kids were my only support

In leaving my marriage,
My two amazing kids who the world loves to hate,

My two amazing kids who saved their own mom’s life,
That’s why I will never stop resisting,

Because I love my two babies too much
And I love all the other kids like them,
Trying to make their way in this harsh, cruel world.

Poem by Rythea Lee: “I Blamed Myself for the Election”

As we approach the second inauguration of Tan Dumplord, I feel rather like the heroine tied to the tracks in an old melodrama, watching the slow inexorable approach of the train. I’m not alone in having a lot of PTSD reactions to the narcissist-in-chief. Trauma therapist and singer-songwriter Rythea Lee wrote this poem in her e-newsletter, which she’s kindly allowed me to reprint here.

I Blamed Myself for the Election

I blamed myself for the results of the election. I know that’s insane. But it’s true.
In the face of a tsunami of horror, my whole body blamed itself.
That’s what I also did when I couldn’t hold off the weight of my father’s violence.
I blamed myself for having been born into it,
I must have done something wrong.

I blamed myself for other children getting hurt, for how could I be so powerless?
I should have kept them safe. I could have. I wanted to.
I tried and failed.
I must have done something wrong.

And now every trigger is here. The man and the hurting souls.
It looks so similar to my past.
All I knew to do was blame myself. That was my best strategy,
I must have done something wrong.

I can see now that it’s not really gonna work.
Hating on myself, or everyone else, isn’t really efficient.
It was a good idea at the time because back then, at least I could hope to be better.
Hope to change something inside me that might make them stop,
I eviscerated every corner of my heart to be better for them.
And IT NEVER WORKED.
They abused me anyway.
I must have done something wrong.

The sun rises today like the sweet song of a mother.
Calling me into a new paradigm where fighting the system
no longer requires me to harm myself.
Lifeforce courses through my cells with a river of determination.
Love wants its way with me.

Love wants to remind me that I never broke
and I’m certainly not going to break now.
Love is showing me the song of sanity that connects me to others
who are singing the same song.
We don’t have to try to know the song, it has always been playing.
We don’t have to force this song, because even when we were utterly alone,
the song played inside our bodies.
We never forgot the song. We are the song.

And now, as the world cries in its deepest pain, it is the clarity of love, not
shame, that guides me forward, putting me to work to the beat of that song.
In knowing who I am right now, I can trust that within me, within so many of us,
something has gone incredibly right.

January Links Roundup: Fiction and Poetry from Gemini Magazine, Missouri Review, and More

Happy (?) 2025, readers. We will resume our regularly scheduled signs of the apocalypse next month, unless I get arrested for peeing in a red state. Let’s start the year off with some reading for pleasure, rather than the news.

First, I was really moved by Stan Duncan’s story “Hodgens” in Gemini Magazine. The narrator, a young preacher in small-town Oklahoma, reminded me of characters from Marilynne Robinson or Walter Wangerin Jr. Perhaps the holiest thing he does is stay present with his sense of inadequacy and not run away from the man he can’t help, a tough-looking but emotionally vulnerable inhabitant of a prison camp. Stan is looking for a publisher for his collection of linked stories; contact me if you can help.

Also in Gemini, Wess Mongo Jolley’s slice-of-life tale “A Candle in the Sun” shows a moment of tenderness between two strangers on a bench in New York’s Union Square Park. Being homeless, the narrator is someone that people often overlook, which allows him, in turn, to be an astute observer of their interactions. “What magic is in this city! How sheer the curtain between Fifth Avenue and Alphabet City. How intertwined the strands of rich and poor, like gray hair and black, braided together in a rope that supports the weight of this city’s soul.”

Gabriel Fine’s “Days of Awe” was The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week on Dec. 2. Observing the Rosh Hashanah traditions with his family, against the backdrop of the Hamas attacks and Israel’s bombing of Gaza, the speaker is chilled by the legend that God decides whom to re-inscribe in the Book of Life during the High Holidays.

…Stone and coiled steel
of the maps and tomes. Signs obscuring the way
to the other country. When did I first learn the terror
of inscription? I loved our songs, feared the book
of names: who shall live and who shall die a cruelty
I failed to understand…

Abby E. Murray, author of the fantastic poetry collection Hail and Farewell, has a poignant parenting poem in One Art called “How (Not) to Die” about “children on playgrounds, processing/what it is to exist in a world built/only by hands that cannot survive/or save it”.

Published in Necessary Fiction in 2023, Robbie Herbst’s flash fiction “The Harvard Whisperer” is part horror, part satire of the precarious society that young people enter and the pieces of themselves (literally!) that they lose to get ahead.

Over at Bending Genres, Shannon Frost Greenstein’s hermit crab essay “Quiz: Are You Perpetuating Intergenerational Trauma and Using the Wrong Skincare Line?” reveals that this humorous non sequitur is not so random after all. There are lots of possible connections to be drawn; I was reminded how mothers try to protect their daughters from cultural misogyny by oppressively micromanaging their appearance.

2. What is your nightly skincare routine?

A. I cleanse, towel dry, and threaten my children with bodily harm if they get out of bed.
B. I fall right asleep because I’m not that invested in modeling positive behaviors.
C. I do a laser light therapy facial mask and pit my children against one another.
D. I cry into my pillow because I’m making the same mistakes as my parents.

Tighe Flatley’s essay in the new issue of The Plentitudes, “How I Learned Victoria’s Secret”, is a young gay man’s coming-of-age story about working in retail at the ubiquitous mall store. By turns melancholy and hilarious, the essay describes the slow process of first assembling a false self and then letting it go.