My body of skin holds the story of my life. Skin holds memory the way the Earth harbors fossils. A touch becomes permanent. The day when I was six years old, walking home from school and recalling the nun had told us we could pray anytime, anywhere. I stopped and...
Greek-style chicken thighs with bruschetta. Italian steaks and panzanella. Seared tilapia and pickled pepper relish. Menu choices at a trendy, highly-ranked restaurant? No. The final challenge recipes of a reality cooking television show? No. On the contrary, they’re...
2:55 pm Pacific Standard time (11:55 pm Paris time): At the boarding gate, I was asked to remove my glasses so that the facial recognition machine could do its job: validate me as a passenger of Air France Flight 0085 bound from Los Angeles for Paris. Could the...
Monica Prince teaches activist and performance writing at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. She is the author of How to Exterminate the Black Woman: A Choreopoem ([PANK], 2020), Instructions for Temporary Survival (Red Mountain Press, 2019), and Letters...
“And it came to pass at the end of the four hundred and thirty years, even the selfsame day it came to pass, that all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt.” -Exodus 12:41 Martha 2020 Her headstone reads: Martha Hughes Cannon ♦1857—1932[1] Three...
Today I am recalling January, thumbing through my day planner, trying to pin this down, trying to put brackets around it. On Monday, January 27, I fly from Portland, Maine to Pittsburgh to visit family. The trip requires two flights, and I wear a mask in both planes....
My grandma’s Singer was black with a yellow and orange floral pattern on the side. It folded down like origami into a table when she wasn’t using it, but mostly I remember it upright, with her sitting hunched over her sewing, foot pumping the treadle while I stood...
My mom forgets that she lives in China. “I live in Michigan.” she tells me during our Skype chats, the South China Sea almost visible from the window behind her. I search her face for the woman I use to know. Her eyes are sometimes harried, frenzied by imagined...
The intersection of body and place dominates Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s second collection Lima::Limon, a book that makes explicit the ways in which female bodies are excavated and mined. She writes in “The Hunt,” the final poem of the collection, “I am a lucky /...
My words are purple and my brain is growing green tell them about all those you found This is the time to be outta your mind. I have never been so sure of anything, she said. Or have I? I’m not sure When my kids were little, their art was everywhere. Finger...
