FALL 2020
Issue
Fourteen
CONTENT WARNING: WORK IN THIS ISSUE CONTAINS POTENTIALLY TRIGGERING CONTENT.
Folio: Inside Voices
Inside Voices is a collection of poems and essays by incarcerated writers in Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in Union Township, New Jersey. We received submissions via mail and accepted every piece sent to us. The work is presented in its original, unedited form.
“Thirty years of hurt dangled its ugly head,
A strayed peacock with plucked feathers.”
“As a Queer woman I had to learn about the 'in's' and 'out's' of sexuality and love.”
Fiction
Edited by Tony Wei Ling
“I need someone to investigate my past,” said Cacau, firmer than before. “I don’t remember anything.”
I have dreams of living at our old house
“the monitoring goes beyond the false horizons of death and the body, tracked until the traces made by the tracking of the body take its place.”
“She can feel the grime scraping along her lungs, stuck there, multiplying into a colony or some other bullshit she has no way of treating.”
Poetry
Edited by Jennifer Soong
“no more waking up spatula in hand to walk down down down down down down down”
“Futurity is born in the catalogue of the not yet foreclosed upon. How I have hoped through this hope. Future is losing emptiness.”
“No. It’s not there either. / Let it be stolen, / thrumming on skin / somewhere, just not here anymore.”
“I don’t say what he cannot say, because I know silence is another word for a bomb. I don’t say what I know what I’ve always known. That I feel it too.”
“e c h o: I cannot say / r e s i s t a n c e: I cannot say / e c h o: what kind of echo / r e s i s t a n c e: what kind of echo”
“The sky is thick with smoke today and tiny particles of ash are falling from the sky. / Everyone says: it’s so apocalyptic.”
“No mention is made of international adoption / 1. Logical phase of westernization / 2. Logical symptom of globalization / 3. Logical conclusion of neocolonization”
Nonfiction
Edited by Meghan Lamb
Book Honeyed and The Book Thrower
“I hear you asking, you who are sitting at the very back of this book, who was sleeping earlier, what book did you choose?”
“The side of the road is accented by a number of seemingly functionless sky blue boxes, accented by an American flag, accented by non-native plants.”
an expanse of the transparent . . .
“a beach is not a place, not exactly. it only seems to come to exist when you need it.”
“A passed-down baby blanket, pink-yellow-blue, and all these years no baby. The things I keep are a language that no one speaks but me.”
“Sometimes, what’s wrong is right there floating on the surface like a layer of film, barely set. The appearance of normalcy is just that.”
“We crossed borders as we pleased. White mother, brown stepfather, Black daughter. We flipped radio stations as we drove between the city and the suburbs.”
“We can support each other, but we each still have to do the hard work alone.”
Art
Edited by Xime Izquierdo Ugaz, Tony Wei Ling, & Martha Newbigging
INTERVIEW
A Utopian Society Full of Black Women
“I’ve always drawn women coming together and just being themselves.”
TAIRA RICE
ESSAY
“Coco Guzman, Jeffrey Cheung, and Syrus Marcus Ware all make drawn marks to represent the human form.”
INTERVIEW
“I wouldn’t ever deny that my work is associated with cuteness, because it is in relation to it, but I can’t name yet how it’s functioning . . . ”
INTERVIEW
“I love myself completely, I will never doubt myself again.”