Hello from your editors! We have a few pieces lined up for you for both Suicide Prevention Month and Bi Visibility Month. As for why we are not doing this in September? Well… bunch of illnesses among our editors. C’est la vie (we hope). So thank you for sticking with us through our hiatus and…
Tag: mental health
Moth Wings
The cigarette hurt my throat, but I finished it quick to impress Grant. We lean against the pigeon-poo-stained railing under the bridge next to the river, watching the pool we made with our spit. A disgusting moth repeatedly flew into the flickering light that lit up the bridge we were standing beneath. The sound of…
Sleep & the Raveled Sleeve: Mental Health Shorts
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. And we decided to showcase a variety of approaches and perspectives–two memoirs followed by one work of fiction. We noticed that sleep plays a big role in all three and that is no coincidence–too little sleep or too much is such a common ingredient in a person’s mental health…
Why 30 Days? Why 30 Poems? Because April is the Cruelest Month
As we look back on our recently concluded 30 Days, 30 Poems Project celebrating National Poetry Month and continue to mark Mental Health Awareness Month in May, we are sharing this piece today, about the intersection between the two. If you are in the US and need urgent mental health assistance, you can call, text…
Ties that Bind
I’m going to tell you the story Da told me, and he says he got it from his own Da, Bill Verling. I don’t remember him – he died when I was about two – but Da swears up and down that Granda always spoke about what he saw that night in awe. Granda wasn’t…
Saadat Hassan Manto: “The Assignment”
Author’s notes: Content warnings for self-harm, political violence, sexual violence. I consistently refer to Manto’s hometown as “Bombay” rather than Mumbai. I do this for two reasons. The lesser reason is that “Bombay” is simply Portuguese for “Beautiful Bay,” whereas Mumbai is short for “Mumbadevi” and the change was made in 1995 at the instigation…
Trans Day of Rememberance
This post about Trans Day of Remembrance comes to us from Kieryn J. McCann. You can read Kieryn’s amazing poem “Kayla Marie” here.–ed. Today, November 20th, is internationally acknowledged as Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoR). It is a day of collective mourning for the trans community. The first TDoR vigil was held in 1999 by…
Ways of Saying “And”
I tried to answer my first wifein truth(e)that, yes, she is selfishand that this is good:Less wear, Few wounds, No rind where ought be ‘life.’But she gnashed and wailed,her Protestant iceberg atremble,and I curled back my wordswith the bad faith of the midway lover. We’d matched tattoos—still do, I’d think:Black ink ampersands,near or on our hands.Hers: a…
Bi+ Visibility 2023
Note: A lot of language surrounding gender is new. These words/ideas have been around for years but it’s only in the last decade or so that the singular “they” and the idea of gender as a spectrum have entered the public consciousness. You’ll see a lot of the outdated style of language in this piece,…
Kayla Marie
I remember you thinking about what to do when we’re gone. There are so many options now, “Bury me gently in the cold dark earth” “Bury me in satin… Lay me down in a bed of roses… Send me away with the words of a love song… … oh oh” I could be a tree!…