Editor’s note: The full version of this essay will be published in a new collection of essays: Natalia Ginzburg’s Global Legacies, edited by Stiliana Milkova Rousseva and Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). [1] For a long time Natalia Ginzburg avoided talking openly about her Jewish origins. She interrupted her silence, or rather, her . . .
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OPENING: A pair of sheer white curtains undulate as a breeze blows. They are suspended in air, floating on their own. Behind them, pitch black. NARRATORWe are here, at a criss-cross of story and memory, place and time.We are here to witness and listen, to embrace and mend the fractures.Why are you here? . . .
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There was no Google where you could type in “gay liberation” or “trans” and find all there was to know. Even the term “homosexual” wasn’t used, and to take back a title from a pamphlet in FUORI!, it was an “unmentionable practice.” The first time I’d heard about it publicly was in . . .
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You approach and I offeranother girl’s name. Curtains, velvetand crushed, mostly closed. See it this way: coyote’s tooth danglingcoy from my locs.You approach (my hair draping, obscuring my face)and it falls Tonight, like disco lights, beckons my selfto myself. There’s just enough lightfor me.—from “Of Starshine and Clay,” Volume 64, Issue 4 . . .
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Passing through the yardChoked with thirsty grass,You might see the newestAdults huddled in tight circles. Never alone. The beast mother isAll they know. —from “Mother of Beasts,” Volume 64, Issue 4 (Winter 2023) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.Good Advice About Bears came as a result of a guided meditation . . .
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Graffiti for Palestine at the Teacher-Student Centre, University of Dhaka. Photo by Frameofashik, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Beyond Politicians As Israel’s war on the Palestinian people escalated, in the aftermath of Hamas’ October 7 attack on a rave and two kibbutzim in southern Israel, protests erupted around the globe. Educators . . .
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In a quiet hall, beneath a church in Chicago’s West Side, too many of us stand in a circle and wait for introductions. Some with our headphones on, our fingers crossed. Others with our eyes on the trays of food. The radio on my hip burrs. Pitches. Hums. Condenses—until I can hear . . .
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Malak Mattar, When Family Is the Only Shelter (painted during the 2021 assault on Gaza). A massacre is unfolding in Rafah, where the population of two-thirds of the besieged Gaza strip—over 1.5 million Palestinians—has been forcibly displaced. News that the Egyptian state is building a prison camp to receive Palestinians, presumably after . . .
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Countée Cullen, c.1927 Review of Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance by Kevin A. Brown. Forthcoming in 2024 from Parlor Press. Will our life’s work be considered a lead melody or an accompanying harmony in the symphony of history? Does it matter if one plays first or fourth chair in the orchestra if we are talking . . .
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Equal parts energy and mass, bodies are heldtogether by light. You learn how lightpollutes, dependent on its ability to scatter.The womb gets lighter with every daughteryou have and every daughter you don’t have.Those daughters weigh stones hand overfist before building them into your womblike a ballast or fallen wall.—from “I Ask My . . .
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