No town looked less aerodynamic than Des Moines, Iowa, when the Earharts moved there in the autumn of 1907. It was all a special kind of coal-dust black, from the blocky Fourth Street high-rises towering some six-seven stories over the little blackened alleys; […]
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Light Gremlin
This series, which has garnered the name Light Gremlin, attempts to recreate the contradictory and confusing feelings of depression, while simultaneously suggesting that beauty can be found anywhere, even in dark moments. […]
“Rated PG-13 for Language and Mild Sexual Situations”: The Complicated Question of Sexuality in M.T. Anderson’s Feed
In a society where approximately seventy-three percent of people have essentially unlimited and uninterrupted access to a colossal version of the internet through “the feed” (Anderson 112), one would expect pornography downloads and other interactions with sexually explicit material or services to skyrocket. But M.T. Anderson’s young adult novel Feed lacks direct representations of sex and sexuality altogether, instead only hinting at pleasure-driven sexual relationships rather than demonstrating them outright. […]
Black and Queer Intersectionality in Nella Larsen’s Passing
Personal identity is one of the most complicated aspects of human sociality—the realms in which our identities exist, coexist, and intermingle are often responsible for the ways in which we interact with the world around us. In the twenty-first century, specifically the last decade, concepts of identity formation and intersectionality have been at the forefront of media and scholarship. […]
The Bazaar of Disclosure
If you tell me why you always ring the Hornet hive doorbell / and wait with a spoon thinking it’s a honey hive, thinking / the amber inhabitants will remind you to wipe your feet on the welcome / mat before letting you swallow and scoop honey soup and larvae lava, / I’ll tell you why I stood Swan-Lake-point-toed […]
The Funerary Round
My mother goes first, / turning herself into the clock / that stopped right twice each year, / a metronome of albums, candles, and prose; […]
Invitation
Momo tries. She really does. Wanting to make a good impression on her fiancée’s dad, they specifically took time off work so that she could visit Ying Yue’s dad and get to know him, then invite him to their wedding. […]
Alone Together: Friendship in Virginia Woolf’s Flush
A woman and her dog, living through the words of Virginia Woolf, experience the joys and sorrows of friendship—of a friendship that spans the life of that dog from his puppyhood to his last breath and that leaves its mark upon the woman. […]
Before the Rain
Nature is something that frequently captivates me; I enjoy using photography to capture the beauty I see. This photograph, Before the Rain, was actually a lucky mistake. I had forgotten to adjust the manual settings before taking my photo; the aperture was not large enough and it lacked exposure […]
“Technology Xiao Jie” 2020, digital
As a child, I was always aware of the space I occupied as an Asian female. I lived in a mostly white neighbourhood, so the only thing that I yearned for was to assimilate and be like my Caucasian friends. I cast away my Chinese heritage in hopes that I would be accepted not only by my peers, but by myself […]
Don’t Look Back: The Rose-Coloured Nostalgia of Rouge and Happy Together
Nostalgia is a common theme across the Hong Kong cinematic canon, particularly in the New Wave films created during the transition period between the 1984 signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the 1997 Handover of Hong Kong. This essay will focus on how nostalgia is configured and located in Stanley Kwan’s Rouge (1988) and Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997) […]
Weekend I.
We burn the needle over a lighter Mimi found in her mom’s purse. Then she lies on her pink sheets, facing away from me as I kneel next to her head. With clean hands I tuck a dry bar of soap behind her ear and poise the needle over the dot she drew. […]
My Dad is Jeff Probst
I always knew Dad was handsome. When I was five, I remembered the fluorescent hazy lights of the television flickering before my eyes. I saw people who looked like the kids in my class, and sounded like them. Eing-lish. A language I didn’t quite understand yet […]