Despite there being an estimated one billion squatters worldwide (Neuwirth, 2004), Kesia Reeve has argued that “squatting is largely absent from policy and academic debate and is rarely conceptualised, as a problem, as a symptom, […]
Strange Fruit
for Abel Meeropol and Billie Holiday No one will hang you with a noose tonight,Either of sisal, hemp, or the chord of Southern steel. But falling on the narrowing alleys of your freedom,The Freudian slip […]
Refugee
I was a stranger and you welcomed me. To those with ears: a crisis looms— the sojourner is at the door of our strange land. Desperate, hopeful, hungry, tired, the least of these lie down […]
Ectoplasmic Nervousness: Mediumship and Medicine
Sarah Turner was a devout Christian, a widowed mother, and a woman removed from her Rhode Island community because of a chronic illness. Sarah Turner also had visions. In her 1841 memoir, Turner writes that […]
I Heard You, Did You Hear You?
Stripping my shoes off, I got behind the airport security line to go through the full body scanner. I looked around at the bins to my right, my Macbook alone in its plastic gray bin. […]
Hope is a Thing with Muscle
My teacher said I should not rewrite Dickinson,that we need fly-up, soar-to-skyrising-above-us guides. Wings. She’s wrong. Hope requires muscle,grit, I-will-do, flex of sinewhere. Present. Woke. Able. Stargazing and skywritingwill not move the plow. Push. Lift […]
On Declarations of Independence
Less than 75 years after the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence (1776), Elizabeth Cady Stanton presented the Declaration of Sentiments, at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first women’s rights convention organized […]
Three Rivers
The most recent season of The Handmaid’s Tale—the astonishing Hulu series that began as an adaptation of the novel by Margaret Atwood—begins by gesturing to what nineteenth-century readers experienced as their own most thrilling, dystopian, […]
Unholy Triptych for the New Immigrant
Madres— women forced to spreadtheir legs, open their mouthsto coyotes in desertsinside shipping containershooked to Mack Trucks,husbands and childrentorn from them—your tired your poor Padres—men in safe housesalong the long routebraving bordersstarved and beatenbadgered and […]
tracks from there to here
Midnight, the train, the heard past, the rumbling stall of an apartment behind the jukebox, the cattle call of miners, pipefitters, boilermakers naming shots chased with budweisers. The dirty hands, dirty faces. The women beehived […]
