Patrick J. Zhou

Minnesota Review

Dead Dog

Money-church on the radiosays God loves landlords. Saysthe love of money is the rootof all evil, not the money itself.Unless you love a dollar morethan an investment property,you're holy, you've got cleanhands. The borrower is slaveto the lender, which is to saywhat about a tenant? Callerasks money-pastor Dave howto get out of debt. He says riceand beans, sell your Honda.Cut to commercial, we hearDave in a Lambo, vroom vroom,he's a car guy. Caller has 100kin student loan debt, makesminimum wage. Get a betterjob, get another job. Your kidswon't remember the time theylost. Buy my book, but you canhave it for free. Caller lives ondisability payments. Don't stepfoot inside a restaurant unlessyou're working there. It's God'swill for you to prosper. Like Daveprospers. He doesn't love moneybecause he has it. Caller alwaysasks, How are you doing, Dave? Davealways answers, Better than I deserve.

Sarah Gzemski

Better Than I Deserve

Virginia Reeves

The Keenan House Fire

he came in my mouth and it was like rawegg, all salty richness turned bitteraftertaste. After that last time, all I wantedwas to find a soda. We eventuallycollapsed into a bar where we were a fewyears shy of fitting in; I fed french fries to adog sitting outside, looked up at stars,replaced the taste of him with somethingsweeter, then said: "Doesn't this feel like amovie?" As though I didn't need to settlemy stomach, soak up the acid of him withstarch, fizzle out the nausea withcarbonation. As if I knew anything otherthan being proud of the bile filling mymouth. Regardless, Coca-Cola washed itdown, just fine.

Lydia Weinberger

I Drank Coca-Cola When

start with the walls. ignore what's below.ignore the girl, or if your eyes run to her,see her as a single red stain. instead,the light: how it rises in gold smoke,teeming with small holes. shattered light,light that drowns the swelling fields. i said ignore the girl.i said ignore what's reaching for her,or if your eyes fly to those shapes,see clean hands, see mouths that holdnew velvet against the tongue. instead, the walls:how they pulse like a single nervecrushed between nail and nail bed.like a wasp slapped flat. like the bootcoming down again. ignore the girl,but if her heat demands your eyes,see me, see my hands cupped at the waist,my hair crowned and shining,my own foot on the sun-warm stone.seethe wrong choice, over and over,the flower in my hands but it's notblooming, i leaned in closebut i can't tell if it's blooming. i'm ignoring what's below,mass of wild lines, each blurred face sliding clean.

Maria Zoccola

helen, alone

I want to write a poem that admitsit had to put its pants on to write this.It had to get sober to say this. It hadto eat a Big Mac next to the nightingaleswinging over a sea to contemplatehow a human spirit awakens in a womb.It reluctantly cleaned the kitchenand brushed its teeth three timesbefore opening its mouth. This poemis dressed, functioning in its friendships,its profession, its yoga practice. Thispoem is ashamed and still wants more.I want an art that doesn't binge. Or cycleblame through the dead to find hunger.I want to drive to McDonald's gently,already pleased, remember to use theapp and my points. When we were kids,my parents took this poem to McDonald'swhen they were tired, or maybe proud.We went home and put our own cheesein the burgers and felt this poem separatelyin our tight, temporary rooms.

Sara Borjas

Eating McDonald's

Saadeya was pregnant. It was a blistering hot day; the sun hung over their heads, and even the horses looked like they were a minute away from collapsing from the heat. But Saadeya didn't care, she was pregnant. She told the hens first, but they didn't care. They laid eggs every day and only asked what took her so long in the first place; they reminded her of the old ladies from her village, always poking their beaks in her business. When she whispered the news into the rabbits' ears, they only cared about how many children she was carrying; she secretly hoped for only one, because she doesn't think she can handle more, at least for now. Only the cows understood her and gathered around her lowing and mooing in celebration of the great gift she was bearing.Her husband was ecstatic, and so was her mother-in-law. All they cared about was that they should host a huge gathering, invite everyone in the village, invite everyone from the neighboring villages. Have a feast—no, two feasts—and slaughter a million animals because killing innocent souls in celebration for the coming of one was logical to them. Saadeya tried to protest but to no avail; both her husband and mother-in-law were headstrong like that. When they set their minds to something, it was going to happen no matter what, so she took no part in their planning and dreamt about her baby.Everyone wanted her to have a boy, even the horses, but she couldn't care less for the gender of her baby, she loved it—no, them—she loved them no matter what. She already loved them more than all the rabbits and all the cows and all the hens and all the animals she have ever met. She'll love them even more than Besela, the cat she had for four days when she was seven before her mom found out and threw the cat back into the street. Saadeya never got over it, the donkey said it was her first heartbreak, of course, she'll never get over it.The day of the celebration came, which was set on a Sunday, the day on which Saadeya would've been pregnant for nine months on the dot. Sety Labiba, her mother-in-law, insisted it should be that way so no one would give Saadeya or the baby the evil eye. Sety Labiba prepared every meal to perfection. All types of food were to be served. From the savory, like molokhia with rabbits and rice with veal, to sweets like konafa and loqmet el qady. She knew Saadeya never ate any meat, so Sety Labiba set aside some rice so she could have something to eat. Saadeya had a weird thing about animals, but she had a heart of gold, so Sety Labiba allowed her son to marry her.But it was known, a pregnant woman has to eat all forms of food, including meat and fish, or else the baby will be born weak, and Sety Labiba can't have her grandchild be weak, what will the people say about them? That her son was flawed? She couldn't stand for it. Besides, Saadeya was in her ninth month already, some meat would do her more good than harm. But there was nothing she could do short of forcing her to eat some, and it was known that upsetting a pregnant woman this late in her pregnancy would result in a temperamental child, so she kept her mouth shut until Saadeya gave birth, at least. Then, she'll feed the poor child some of her famous bouftek and then the child will be as strong as ever.Zaghareet and chants filled the place, and Saadeya's smile couldn't be bigger and more genuine. People were dancing and celebrating, all for her baby. Every few minutes someone would come over and congratulate her, and ask when is she going to give her unborn child a sibling, but she ignored them. Today was her day, she was not going to allow trivial things like that to bother her. She focused on the birds singing at the top of their lungs, the dogs barking up a storm, and the occasional neighing of a horse and mooing of a cow: the melodic sound of all of her friends wishing her a healthy baby.During the celebration Om Fawzeya, Sety Labiba's friend, came and put her hand on Saadeya's stomach and declared that she would be giving birth to a baby boy. That she could feel his strong aura, that he was going to be a great man and a great leader. Sety Labiba nudged Saadeya with her elbow to congratulate her, but Saadeya didn't truly care, as long as her baby was healthy that would be enough for her.Dinnertime came, and the throngs of people gathered around the food that Sety Labiba had made with the help of the old ladies of the village. Saadeya couldn't help but feel sad for all the animals that had been killed, supposedly in her honor, but she couldn't do anything. Besides, she apologized to her friends beforehand and they all said that they knew she would never do anything like that to them, that they forgave her.So she sat with the others, but she couldn't help herself, she was so very hungry. She looked at the different types of food available, in hopes of finding something without meat in it so she could eat it. The molokhia looked quite delicious, and there was nothing in it, as far as she could tell. She poured some of it on the rice Sety Labiba made especially for her and ate it, and the flavors danced on her tongue; she'd have to personally thank Sety Labiba for the food, it tasted exquisite.Sety Labiba saw Saadeya eating from the molokhia with rabbits and was quite baffled. She tried to make Saadeya eat rabbits on multiple occasions, and she always refused, even if it was used merely as a stock in the molokhia. But Sety Labiba did not stop her, pregnant women always had weird cravings, she would know herself. When she was pregnant with her fifth child all she wanted to eat was watermelon with feta cheese, even though she never used to like feta cheese. Being pregnant opened her up to trying new food, maybe that was what was happening with Saadeya. She told her to get pregnant sooner, but she never listened. Sety Labiba knew that a woman will never be fully a woman until she has at least one child.It was a week later that Saadeya gave birth to her baby, and it was the most stressful week of her whole pregnancy. She had a stomachache so bad that she wasn't able to leave her bed at all. The baby would not settle; they would kick and kick and kick all day and night, which did not help her already upset stomach. She couldn't bear to eat anything except for the lentil stew and mowghat Sety Labiba made her, anything else was expelled out of her the same instant it touched her tongue. For some reason, the animals stopped talking to her as well.Squalling and screaming, Saadeya gave birth to a healthy baby boy. He had all ten toes and ten fingers, nothing else mattered to her.But people talked a lot about Moamen, especially his eyes. He had huge, perfectly round eyes that were too big for his face, in which you couldn't see anything except for the subtle brownness of them, no white whatsoever. His stare was menacing and skittish. The perfect roundness of his face and cheek didn't help soften the intensity of his gaze, even for a newborn child.Sety Labiba couldn't bear to look at her grandson's eyes, they unsettled her. Something was wrong with the child, and she felt it in her bones, but they couldn't tell what it was. The doctors said he was fine, that maybe he'll grow into them, but they all eye him warily like they themselves don't know how to diagnose him or what was wrong with him in the first place. She thinks it was Om Fawzeya that gave him the evil eye; she only gave birth to girls and she always wanted a boy, so she must have jinxed him.Saadeya loved him with all her might; she loved him more than she thought she was capable of loving, after all, she had no one but him. The animals stopped talking to her after she gave birth to Moamen; she tried several times but ultimately gave up after the hens almost plucked out her eyes, and the rabbits kept on biting her. At first, she thought they were jealous, that they thought she'd ignored them for her baby, but when she mentioned that to the mare, she told her to stop being stupid and threatened to kick her in the face. She took the message as it is and never visited them again. The people in the village wouldn't talk to her as well, but they didn't matter to her.She went back to her normal, day-to-day routine after she gave birth, just much more lonely and quieter than before. She collected the eggs from the hens as quickly as possible because if they felt that she was stalling to spend more time with them, they would peck her to death. The cows would tolerate her milking them only once a day instead of the usual three, and they would spit at her the whole time. But she could handle them, sometimes even enjoyed the peaceful silence, but the rabbits were the ones she dreaded going to the most. Whenever she went to clean their ditch, refresh their food and water, or even grab Moamen's blanket from his bed there to wash it, they'd try to bite chunks off her arms and legs, a particularly vicious one once climbed her and tried to bite her nose off.Moamen spent all of his time with the animals now, just like she used to, the only difference was that he never left them. He slept with the rabbits, showered with the cows, ran around with the horses, and even gossiped with the hens. She saw how the mother cow berated him when he was too rough with the other calves and how the hens gently pecked him when they thought he wasn't eating enough, so she wasn't worried about him, he was safe. It wasn't like he completely abandoned her. Every day, he'd come and have breakfast with her, kiss her forehead, and then he'd go and hang with her friends and she'd go on with her day.Sety Labiba couldn't handle the shame of having the two of them in her family. She brought this on herself, she allowed her son to marry her in the first place. But the past is so far away, and she knows that death will be coming for her soon; she can feel it in her bones. Maybe Saadeya knew better than to eat any animal's meat, she knew what was best for her baby. Maybe if she told her, back then, but no. There was no point in regretting past actions. What is done is done. As the saying goes, it's no use crying over spoiled milk. Even if it had a tapping foot and twitching nose.Saadeya's friends aren't afraid of her Moamen. She knows that if anything, they love him more than they have ever loved her. They hang around his every word, they seek him out and flock around him, and they invite him to sleep beside them and fight over his company. They are a family to him more than she could have ever been, and she is okay with that. She knows they will take care of him, and that he is truly happy in their midst, away from all humans. Sometimes, if he spotted her in the fields, he'd run and give her the tightest hug and then run back to his friends.

Mariem Khaled

Caught in a Fluffle

Other| May 01 2024 Contributors the minnesota review (2024) 2024 (102): 164–168. https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-1104719 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Contributors. the minnesota review 1 May 2024; 2024 (102): 164–168. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-1104719 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsthe minnesota review Search Advanced Search Ellery Beck is a graduate of Salisbury University with a BA in creative writing. They are a winner of the 2019 AWP Portland Flash Contest, a Pushcart Prize nominee, the founding interview editor for The Shore, and a poetry reader for Poet Lore. They have poems published or forthcoming in Passages North, Colorado Review, Zone 3, Sugar House Review, Fugue, and elsewhere. Ellery is also one of the cofounders of Beaver Magazine.Sara Borjas is a self-identified Xicanx Pocha and an award-winning Fresno poet who teaches creative writing and English courses. Her work can be found in Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, and The Offing, among others. Her first collection, Heart Like a Window, Mouth like a Cliff, was published in 2019. She believes that all Black lives matter and will resist white supremacy... You do not currently have access to this content.

Contributors

Other| May 01 2024 Retraction the minnesota review (2024) 2024 (102): 169. https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-11334799 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Retraction. the minnesota review 1 May 2024; 2024 (102): 169. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-11334799 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsthe minnesota review Search Advanced Search Retraction of Briana Campbell's "Afro-Latina: After Airea D. Matthews," minnesota review 94 (2020): 32.The author of the poem "Afro-Latina: After Airea D. Matthews" has requested that it be retracted from the minnesota review 94 (2020).https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-8128210 You do not currently have access to this content.

Retraction

My housemate leaves the party after me and tells me his Uberdriver was talking about raping someone. That he cornered adrunk ex at a party and told her to just stay quiet if she wantedit. Someone intervened and now this man is angry and drivingUbers and telling young men about the "one that got away."That same night, I black out for the first time in my life. I am outof my rideshare and back in the house minutes before I amvomiting and semi-unconscious; my boyfriend tells me abouthow I drunkenly take off my clothes in the hallway, how hesweetly sits next to me and pets my head until the nauseapasses, and how, as he tried to get me to sit up so he could putme in pajamas, I struggled, said "no, no, I need to get home."Then slept soundly in our bed.

Close Encounters

and plants that thrive in small kitchens and salty food and especially medium-sized cheeseburgers that I can actually eat and crisp, fancy pickles and bleu cheese and cotton candy. I also hate driving into an unfolding sunset with my lover and sleeping an entire night without waking up once to pee or think. I hate the FIFA World Cup and the delicate relationships of the soccer field. I abhor the coyote's enduring howl through the carrot-colored canyon and my home, the pull of a joint as I rest on the tarnished hood of my best friend's teal Silverado next to a blooming grapevine. I hate my little sister and her beautiful fucking soul and her flourishing talent and ability to hurt us all and her cute ass dog Noodle who I would be happy to all day squeeze. I hate HGTV, and seeing families find homes to raise their peculiar and promising children in, kind of as much as I hate my friend Angel's devotion, and my mom's special humor and my limitless pleasure. I hate my clear, cool life—which is not a problem to be solved, just a total mystery I have to live.

I Hate Poetry

Ghost crabs have teeth in their stomachs.Lobsters have taste buds on their feet.Foxes hold their weddings in the rain.The tongue of a blue whale can weigh more than a car.The creator of Pringles was buried in a man-sized Pringles can.Cigarettes are sexy.A Jif is a peanut butter brand.A jiffy is ten milliseconds.A Jiffy Lube is a great place to blow a cock.On Mars, the sun bruises the horizon blue.At the top of Mount Everest, bumblebees shiver.Apples? Yum!Cotton candy was invented by a dentist.Cotton candy was named cotton candy by a different dentist.The dentists were not lovers.Makeup gets its luster from crushed fish scales.Squids have three hearts.Ketchup is a cure for indigestion.Rabbits can incubate chicken eggs.Mosquitos can penetrate the human skull.Texas isn't real.All English swans belong to the monarchy.All almonds belong to the peach family.All Mickeys belong to the mouse.

Mickie Kennedy

True Facts

I am an Adonis shadow, carved starkerby candlelight than suns or standing lamps.My form is mammoth, one of thosesandcastle sculptures hewn from the coastby someone who has nothing betterto do with their holiday. If I twitchmy Michelangelan hand twitches. You coulddraw my tendons in charcoal sketches on the wall,bigger than I ever allowed myself to be before.I don't look soft for once. I'm not cravingplush skinny or ice cubes or fingernails,only the curl of thick hair at a napewhen there is nothing else to wonder about,still girl but aware. The intersection of womanand not is an already-threaded needle,strands untouching but tethered, primedfor making and remaking. To be Godis to reshape the wheel, to repeat with honestywhat it means to be female and then shatter it,shouting Eve to the rafters. I could rewrite the Biblein Hulu captions, scrolling under bare breastsand lip-focused dolly-ins. It would be more at home hereamong hip bones and semen syringes and paisley haltercrop tops than anywhere so-called spotless.I'd let the Apostles be naked when they wantto be naked, take a spin class, kiss a belly buttonor two. I'd queer a place for myself somewherebetween episodes nine and ten, the booksof Matthew and Mark. I'd be divine femininethe way Venus the planet is feminine, the waya beautiful hunk of jade is feminine, the way Godmight be feminine. There's somethingof the woman-loving Jesus in everymountain range curve of my arm,the dip of night in my neck, the dewymiddle of my hand.

Dina Folgia

Watching <i>The L Word</i> at 1:45 a.m. on Easter Sunday

Abstract In the last three decades of the twentieth century, theory became a “cognitive good” throughout the American academic humanities. The rise and uses of this new high-tech good fit the “new spirit of capitalism,” to quote Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello's 2018 book by the same name, a post-1960s “ideology that justifies engagement in capitalism.” A neoliberal ethos and disposition animated theory and possessed theorists, as well as spaces that circulated theory, such as the University of Minnesota's Theory and History of Literature book series, theory journals, and the University of California, Irvine's School of Criticism and Theory. Meanwhile, capitalism incorporated the nature, scope, and social effectiveness of critique by way of theory in American higher education; theorists worked in a university where neoliberal forces saturated and directed professional and intellectual protocols. The academic humanist Left's promotion of theory, for instance, facilitated the formation of the “university” as a theater for culture war conflicts, shifting attention inside and outside the academy away from underlying changes in capitalism.

Gregory Jones-Katz

The Euphoria of Theory

While fire follows the broken moon and the skyfollows the irises spinning like seaside hotelscarefully falling off cliffs only to discoverthey like these new places althoughno wheat grows here. The fields remainso much alkali, terrible here for the finalcloset full of imitations and moths. Trees createrain for lovely peripheral gardens. Hungerfollows the dream; beauty follows murderwhile sleep follows nothing anymore becauseit's all a lie: we look out onhopeful wilderness and findweeds growing from our beds,our heads become feathers and everyoneforgets how to walk, we followhorses to the slaughterhouse, openbooks about survival and knowan end to all safe places.

Dana Curtis

Water Follows the Plow

Nanay, I wanted to let you know that before I left for myflight to the US this morning, I kissed your chair and watched itstay empty. There's an apparition in the window the dustmotes love, and I am once again feeling a soft hand onmy back, a whisper grazing my neck, chanting, You'rehome, you're home, you're home. When I was a childand you were stuck in the wrong country, you told meyou missed the roosters crowing at four in the morningand greeting shirtless men playing cards in the street atnight. And last month when you told me you found your fathercoaxing a stray dog you named Santo who loved thetaste of your slippers, you spent an afternoon describinghim for the missing posters you wanted me to put up forhim. I haven't pulled the posters down.Just last week, you must haveremembered that when I think of home, I think of wide,flat backyards, of cardinals slicing through the sky,because you asked me what I was doing in the wrongcontinent. Nanay, America has rewritten my memoriesmore than you feared. Yesterday, I went out to buy youbalut and practiced Tagalog with the neighborhood'sshirtless men gathered for a game of cards. One mancouldn't look at me when he joked that he'd seen Santooutside his house. I didn't understand why until Iremembered. Nanay, that night, I sat before your emptychair and ate the balut alone, chanted I love you, but Ihave to go back until the window reflected the ghost of achild who never thought of cardinals and flat backyardsbut of streetlight contouring the backs of shirtless menleaning over cards, of roosters and missing stray dogs,your ghost whispering against my neck, We're home,we're home, we're home.

Yvanna Vien Tica

Article 1: [On the Back of a Discarded Boarding Ticket in the O'Hare Airport]

Take care of the unrefined earth, chisel herinto child. Be careful—the upsetting will start soon. This is the step when she'll enter air, tarnish, tryon oxidation. This is when you'll wantto cover your eyes, rest her in the oven a moment longer. Scrap bronze, solid stuck. The result: your alloy-meldedmonster, the leftover casts. Tempering can onlytake you so far. There is little blacksmithing left to be done to the body.

Ellery Beck

Forge

At first she just left them lying around, like magazine subscription cards, or the magazines themselves. Her aunt had sent her a Polaroid camera and two dozen boxes of film; I'd be staring out the window in our front door, waiting for the cat to come home for dinner, or working on the puzzle we'd bought, of Klimt's Flower Garden, when suddenly I'd hear the snap of the shutter and the motor of the eject. More often than not, at least at the beginning, the sounds came from nearby: there she'd be, lowering the camera from her face, from my face, hand poised to receive the picture. Then she'd lay the picture face down on whatever surface was near me. She'd read the film developed better that way.From the foyer, the living room, the bathroom. Then, later, on the table by the front door where we piled our mail, the coffee table, the toilet tank: the picture, face down.Before long I stopped hearing the camera. I waited by the door for the cat, worked on the puzzle we'd bought, watched the birds in our backyard with my binoculars, all without interruption. She was still taking pictures, though. I knew because the pictures, face down, had begun to pile up. In the places where I'd once found a single picture—on the toilet tank, on the counter by the back door—I now found several, stacked one on top of the other. I'd forget about the pictures for a few days or weeks and then remember, and when I looked away from the eyepiece of my binoculars or the puzzle we'd bought the stack was always higher. When I thought to, I listened for the camera. I never heard it. She never took a picture when I was listening.One day, while I was waiting at the front door for the cat, I remembered the pictures and had the sudden urge to see what they were of. But when I looked at the table where we piled our mail, I found that the stack of pictures, face down, was gone. In its place was a single picture, face up. At first I couldn't tell what the picture was of. Then I realized: the picture was of the table's surface, the place where it lay. I looked at it. In the picture was the color and grain of the wood and a small dark knot; I could see the same color and grain on the surface of the table itself, the same dark knot just above the picture's top border. It was like a picture of something's background rather than the thing itself. What was the thing supposed to have been? Or was the background itself the thing, because that was what the picture was of? I was looking back and forth from the picture to the table's surface when I heard a scratching at the door. I let the cat in; I'd forgotten her for thinking about the picture.Soon there were others: on the counter by the back door, a picture of the counter; pinched between the slats of the blinds, the slats themselves. When I came across one of these pictures, face up, I would study it. There was never anything surprising in the picture, no small detail you wouldn't otherwise have seen; in fact, the effect was the opposite: the camera washed everything out, so you couldn't really see the details at all. There was just the surface, the background, plainly itself but also, somehow, different (the real surface was always right there, in the background, for comparison). I couldn't tell if the picture added something that wasn't really there or revealed something that was really there but hidden. I would lose myself, looking from the surface in the picture to the surface outside of it, trying to decide.When I heard the camera again, it was just like in the beginning: I was working on the puzzle we'd bought (only, on top of the section I'd completed, the corner with the black flower, there now lay a picture) when suddenly I heard the snap of the shutter, the motor of the eject. I looked up, expecting to see her lowering the camera from her face, from my face. And she was, lowering the camera from her face, waiting for the picture; only the camera was turned the other way around.She removed the picture from the camera and held it against her, face down, to develop. I waited for what would come next. I knew I wouldn't be able to decide.

Jed Phillip Cohen

Landscapes

I would hurt you, even with garlands of stars and stripes.I don't respect promises from patriots that don't involvetheir community, like my brother's Nissan Altima andits cracked rear window he's afraid will break into factories.I won't lay an aluminum oath over my heart. Pitiful it isto receive certainty like a gift, and I will not clutch an idolizedidentity if it means betraying my violent, avant-garde birth.If I must babysit the hours in search for the presentI have dreamed of, keep time in the homes of the pretenders.I will not trade my sanity for it. Until now I have survivedon recycled desires, but an apology offered with half-feltduty, I could not respect, or sing, or love.

Pledge of Allegiance

Abstract This article compares episodes in two historical moments in the United States, the 1960s and the present, to interrogate how public universities have responded to culture war issues and pressure from powerful political actors. It recounts how in Florida the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated a culture war over education and speech related to race and how the University of Florida capitulated to an ambitious governor ultimately bent on synchronizing Florida's university system to his political goals. To highlight the singularity of this episode, the article compares these events with another instance when a governor pressured university leadership over a culture war issue, during the heated era of 1960s protests over racism and imperialism. In 1969 Charles E. Young, chancellor of UCLA, publicly opposed the California regents and Governor Ronald Reagan when they sought to fire a young philosophy professor, Angela Y. Davis, over her communist party membership. Both recent events in Florida and the campaign to dismiss Davis turned on questions of academic freedom. This article explores the conditions that allowed Young to more successfully defend his university's autonomy and concludes that the privatized conception of the neoliberal university's social value makes contemporary universities particularly susceptible to political interference and antidemocratic co-optation.

Susan Hegeman

Institutional Autonomy and Anticipatory Obedience

Abstract This article discusses the politics of time in the culture wars of the 1980s by way of three comments on the discursive and political uses of the conceptual pairs historicism/otium, reform/revolution, and emergency/patience. This article argues that (1) the culture wars articulated a politically valuable dialectic of critique and the objects of critique, 2) historians tend to foreshorten their account of the culture wars and make light of their nonreformist origins, and (3) a reappraisal of the culture wars would provide precious signposts for strategic approaches to current political threats.

Pierre-Héli Monot

Three Historicist Comments

Abstract This article offers a history of Black thought as it has been represented or underrepresented in the university by tracing the phenomenon of the US American cultural wars to the Civil War. The article discusses the displacement of Black knowledges from predominantly white institutional structures as a categorical problem that spreads across all disciplines by identifying four formative aspects of the university: understanding the university as an institution, its relationship with society and literature, and the canon-building discourses that fuel a market demand for certain Black knowledges. Finding that the displacement of Black knowledges is facilitated by a logic of institutional discrimination, which cannot be reduced to only a problem of the university, this article argues that the displacement of Black knowledges is a central problem of American education and foundational to American society and history.

Courtney Moffett-Bateau

Categorical Displacement

God must feel so alone, I thought, staring down at my unbecoming collection of stuffed animals. The newest—my forty-ninth—was a polar bear, stained brown on its breast like a bitten piece of fruit left out on the kitchen counter. As recommended by the manufacturers, I always kept them in the best condition I could—a cool, dry place. They sat in my spare room's perfect silence, and no direct sunlight ever spilled on them. I joked to myself that I was their savior. Sometimes I swore they smiled back. Yes, I was acutely aware of my complex. No, not a god but something familiar.I avoided showing people this room in my apartment. "It's not ready yet," I'd say, despite moving into the downtown suite two years prior. My hiccups came in these instances—as they always do when I'm nervous. "I'm still working on it." I stood in front of the spare room's doorframe, cartoonishly flailing my arms whenever Maria would try to barge her way in. At the time, I'd convinced myself that the most embarrassing thing about it was the idea of a single thirty-three-year-old woman having four walls congested with stuffed dolls. A room you could barely wade through without stepping on a tail. A claw. The mass of beady eyes seemed to trail my every move like some famous painting."Oh, stop, Siobhán. What, you got dead bodies in there or something?" She laughed naively. I laughed too. Everyone knows stuffed animals only die when they're forgotten.I found my first when Maria and I went to Disneyland three years ago. There it was, a Donald Duck plush just sitting on a bench. It begged for someone to sit beside it."No, that's so sad," Maria cried out through a half-chuckle. She took a chomp of her stale churro. "We should bring it to the lost and found." She licked the cinnamon off her lips. "Or something."I didn't mean to take it home. Really. I simply forgot it in my backpack at the end of the day. I stewed over the notion of bringing it back to the park, but our flight home was 10 a.m. the next morning. I didn't get the vibe that she cared much either. Two weeks later, I found a frog Beanie Baby stuck inside the rotating doors at Mayfair Mall. A month later, a Pikachu at the local park's swing set. The weight of iron in my blood must've shifted—I had become a magnet for lost items. I believed I was doing the right thing. They'd just be going in a landfill otherwise, right? If the owner was careless enough to leave them somewhere, why not?Sometimes the toys would have the owner's name written on the tags. I would chop them off."East Bay Swimming Pool. Thanks for calling, how may I help you?""Hello," I said, in my most mature tone of voice on the phone. "Sorry if this is an odd request, but do you happen to have any stuffed animals in your lost and found bin? I think I left one behind the other day.""Oh, sure, one moment, please. Do we have a lost and found bin?" she whispered to someone on the other end before the phone clunked on the counter. And then, a pause. And a ruffle. "Yes, we do! We have two little guys here.""Right." I cleared my throat and twisted a blonde lock of hair around my index. "Do you mind telling me what they are?""Looks like a giraffe and a PAW Patrol dog.""Perfect.""Great. Which one's yours?""Oh. Both. They're my daughter's, actually. I apologize, she's always leaving things behind. Mind if I pop by later this evening?"By my nineteenth rescue, I had the idea of creating a Lost Stuffed Animal Museum. I took in animals (or animal-adjacent beings—I don't consider the "monsters" monsters). I planned to set up the Lost Museum when I felt I'd had enough. It'd be a place the kids could potentially learn about when they're older and finally get reunited. But how many stuffed toys does one kid have, I wondered. They'll forget about it in a week. They won't remember this bear when they're forty, surely. Thoughts like these went back and forth in my mind. No matter the shape, size, or weight, I knew I could take care of them better than any six-year-old could. A six-year-old couldn't recognize the craftsmanship that went into designing one of these creatures. A six-year-old didn't learn to sew to put them back together. But still, I truly did want to see them all go back to their owners one day. I wanted to see their smiling faces when they'd reunite.But sadly, there were never any phone numbers written on them.If my translation work slowed down, I role-played as a doting mother at least three times a week. Rehoming became my part-time job. The lilt in my voice on the phone sometimes blended into my everyday speech patterns. The work was spotty though. Some months I'd receive nothing, some months I'd lose count. After two years of this, I began to run out of legitimate lost and found bins. The hollow husks in thrift stores didn't do it for me. I had exhumed the libraries and excavated the parks. I was getting lazy. Careless. I got caught calling the same place twice on the same day. I soon cursed my hometown for being so small. I missed Aunt Tracie's wedding because I went to pick up a unicorn Squishmallow two towns over. That was the last one I found for three months. Funny how you can never find them when you're looking.I gave them personalities, families, birthdays. Blood types. I had a ritual whenever I'd rehome, always placing them on the right-hand side of the shelf. Then the next one would replace them, and they'd all shift to the left until it ran out of space and the leftmost would fall onto the floor. I'd kiss them exactly twice on their foreheads (or forehead-equivalent surfaces). I'd grown fond of the scent of damp grass and burnt rubber, and the idea of stamping it out. If they had removable clothes—like Donald—I would hand-wash them. Cleanse their tiny souls with hydrogen peroxide and baking soda. I'd hang them to dry on pegs, being careful to only pinch their outer coat and never the stuffing inside. I'd learned their guts were delicate the hard way.For the first year, I mulled over keeping them intact or not—the way I'd found them. Was it wrong to replace one of their marble eyes? To stitch their hip shut? I'd never thought about heaven's consequences. When you imagine yourself in heaven, are you as you are now? Are you yourself the moment you died? Or are you wearing your favorite clothes? Are you clean? Are you your best?By year three, my collection had taken over my spare room, and the overwhelming embarrassment slipped off the skeleton to reveal an epidermal layer of guilt. I began to think I was lying to myself about the ultimate goal of the whole Lost Museum thing. But last week, I saw an opportunity to abolish the shame. It was muddy and raining on the day of Maria's housewarming party. On the double-decker bus to Maria's studio, a mother and daughter sat in front of me. The little girl, no older than five, had the head of a plush turtle sticking out of her school bag. The plush was dirty, with stains and streaks all over its tail and shell. Extremely unkempt. It looked like a rotten apple.But finally, there it was—a toy I could reunite with its owner.My heartbeat spiked. I just couldn't take my eye off the thing the entire ride. After stewing over the idea for fifteen minutes, the mother broke my daze by pressing the button to signal their stop to the driver. The button's plinking sound made my throat involuntarily swallow. I peeked over my shoulder, making sure no one else sat behind me. As the two got up to leave, I swiftly snatched the toy and stuffed it under my lap. I got hiccups.The surging thrill raced through my veins, and I felt like my chest could split. The mother dragged her child by the hand up to the front of the bus as it turned onto the next street, both giggling at some private joke as they trotted down the aisle, their wet boots squeaking against the floor. My breath quickened as I questioned the ideal moment to run up with the turtle. Is now a good time? The bus began to slow down. Is now a good time? Now? My shoulders tensed. Fingers twitched. I imagined how nice my voice would sound when I approached them. My candor. My countenance. Should I say I felt my toe kick it under my chair? How hard would they thank me? I imagined the child's smile. The relief. Did she love this thing?The bus came to a full halt. I skirted to the edge of my seat, one foot in the middle of the aisle before I peered down at the fiftieth plush. My eyes were fixated on its dirty tail. On its scuffed-up eyes. Its stitching separating.Did she love this thing to death?The mother and daughter walked past me outside the window. I glanced back at them as the bus pulled onto the road. The mother pulled up the daughter's forest-green raincoat hood. She still wore a smile. My hiccups persisted.For the entirety of Maria's party, I couldn't stop thinking about the contents of my purse. It'd be so easy, how I could just stand up and open it in front of everyone, admitting my actions in a drunken stupor. They'd probably laugh. When I brought the turtle home, I held it flat in my open-faced palms. It felt light for its size. The turtle appeared dirtier than when I'd remembered on the bus, although I couldn't bring myself to clean it. I planted a kiss, but a smile never sprouted. I was surprised at how sweet and saccharine it smelled, almost like candied strawberries. I stared into its cute jewel eyes and wondered how it got all its blemishes. I wondered when the little girl noticed it was missing, and how hard she cried. I wondered if the mother offered to buy her a new one, or if it'd even make a difference. I wondered if she considered them a boy or girl.

Dylan Foy

21 Grams

Ada's hand lands on Sydney's knee while they're sitting in Ms. Duluth's classroom, five minutes into their lunch period. Sydney doesn't think it's a big deal that Ada isn't Ms. Duluth's student, because the drama room is always open for loitering with its three couches, its small stage set with a table and stools and crates, folding chairs lined up along the back wall.Ada says, "We get our babies in two weeks, but it's like, I know shaking a baby is bad. Can we move on to a different lesson?"Sydney tilts her head up and down. She thinks of those wooden birds plunging their faces into cups of water but can't remember what they're called or why they exist. She says, "Do you get to pick what your baby looks like?""No, which is fucked up. At least promise me a brown baby. I couldn't love a white one." Sydney pictures Ada's younger siblings flocked all over the fridge at her dad's house, honey-haired and light-eyed.Neither of the girls brought or bought lunch. In the fall, they'll be able to leave campus to cross the street to El Pollo Loco or the donut shop or the taqueria that doesn't have horchata but does have carne asada fries. There's no guarantee they'll eat any of that when the time comes, but at least they'll have an option other than stagnancy. There's a cafeteria near the dance classroom, but in two years they've never tried it.The girls take turns showing each other posts from their feeds. When Ada moves her phone, the mobile of Winnie the Pooh and Hello Kitty charms looped onto the bottom dance above the hand that's still on Sydney's knee. Sydney stares at the space between the rubber accessories and skin and wonders if it tickles her, the almost-touching.Ada likes watching clips of people being injured while doing tasks that could only end in injury. Climbing up lattices to backflip into pools, homemade motorcycles hurtling toward a crash. Ada watches Sydney's face as a video starts, a hand on a dartboard then panning to the man throwing the darts. Sydney shuts her eyes when the man's arm moves and Ada says, "Well it's not fun if you're going to be a baby.""Not liking that gross shit doesn't make me immature," Sydney says with her head turned. Earlier in class, Ms. Duluth asked everyone to do vocal exercises so they could work on enunciation and projection. She walked around to everyone, and when she got to Sydney, she placed three fingers on her throat as they walked through different hums.Ada removes her hand from Sydney's knee, but she can almost pretend the damp residue is the real thing. Sydney wants to say something mean about the charms, about who is really a baby, but she can't because Ada is doing it ironically. Ada with a Medusa piercing and a loose Xanax in her pencil bag.The videos have stopped, and the only sound to Sydney's left is the kissing of nails to screen. Sydney imagines all of the people Ada could be texting and sits silent in her reactions to the ones that would hurt the most. That unnamed nineteen-year-old girl who Ada spent last summer crying over, or Apollo her more-than-dealer.Sydney cranes her neck and tries to see but can't. She would never ask directly."Do you want to share some chips? I can go grab some from Ms. Duluth," Sydney offers toward the quiet. Ada indulges her and says she wants Hot Cheetos or Cool Ranch.Ms. Duluth doesn't look older than some of the seniors, and there's a rumor she's hooked up with a now-graduated boy. On anonymous apps, students argue over if it counts because it wasn't sex, because the boy was eighteen, because who wouldn't feel up Ms. Duluth? Ada believes the rumors because Apollo saw the nude torso that he swears is her. Sydney can count every chest she could recognize on a single hand: her mom's—a saturated glimpse into her future—xoxophoenixluv from black-and-white Tumblr montages, Ada's from the corner of her eye while they changed. Ada's from locker rooms and beach days. Ada's body in the photos she sends to Sydney to ask opinions of, which should i send to him?"Hey Ms. Du, got any Cool Ranch left?" Sydney asks.Her teacher's index finger curls over her lips, then she places her fork down and shuffles through a box beneath the desk. "Your lucky day," she says while handing two bags over.Tonight, Sydney and her mom have to pick her brother up from the airport in Santa Ana. Sydney wonders why they built the airport there when there are so many more important destinations nearby. Why they named it after a white man parading as a cowboy. If Sydney could name it she would pick Mendez, the first time she saw anything from her county in a textbook that wasn't Disneyland. Her brother is out after eighteen months away and her mom only told her last week. Said she should wear something nice so they can treat him to dinner.Sydney tosses the chips at Ada, who isn't looking at her. Sydney thinks she could vanish troublingly easily. Opening the bag from the bottom, Ada places a single, perfect triangle on the center of her tongue. Sydney thinks Ada's tongue is a slick, pink conveyor belt and imagines depositing her earlobes, her pinky finger, the inside of her elbow.Apollo struts into the drama room, and Ada flags him over. He squats between them and places a hand on both of their legs. Sydney tries to remember the last time she fell for the stoplight game. Green. Yellow. Red. A boy—always a boy—continuing to inch up her thighs because firetrucks don't stop for red."I'll never know why you did it," Ada says, running her hands over Apollo's buzz cut. "You're so ugly now."He places the hand that had been on Ada over his heart and pretends to faint onto her lap. Sydney doesn't know what to say so she stares at the menagerie weighing down Ada's phone. The girls like collecting the charms from coin machines in supermercados and liquor stores. Their best find was Piglet in Tigger's skin.Apollo leans back up and gives Sydney's thigh a squeeze and says, "I'm still handsome as ever, right?" She lifts her shoulders and wants to press them all the way to her ears."Leave her alone," Ada says."Did you hear you're about to be a daddy?" Sydney asks. Apollo laughs like boys here laugh, with their teeth climbing beyond their lips, their tongue poised to gleek.His fingers walk up Ada's stomach, flat and hairless in the peak between her top and jeans. Sydney watches as his fingers move up and disappear and she hopes Ms. Duluth will say something, but she doesn't, keeps eating her salad and flipping through pages in her book.Mostly, Sydney feels like an only sibling. Can't remember a time she's talked about her brother to anyone—even Ada. Her brother, ten years older, punching out the windshield of the car meant for her. Her brother, a decade older, locked in a back room. Elsewhere, Sydney and Ada trying to flee their bodies with their dampening and dirtying desires. Sydney makes up scenarios, just for herself, where she was switched at birth or had descended to the ground via a UFO beam. When she's high, she's convinced she's about to be swept back up. Before her brother's release, she and her mom will drive to a strip mall to buy him new Dickie's and belts and wife beaters. She's seen online calls to rename them, Wife Pleasers or Ribbed Tanks, but she thinks the name suits him."Did you still want to come over Saturday?" Ada asks after Apollo leaves. He was here to slip something into her bag, for safekeeping, he said. Sydney nods.Sydney offers to bring her India ink so they can mar their bodies if that sounds fun. Ada shrugs. "Whatever. I'll get some weed from Apollo. Maybe he'll even stick around for a minute."While Ada's dad and stepmom and siblings are off at practices or appointments or family activities she refuses to attend, the girls smoke on the roof. Last weekend, they locked themselves out and spent the afternoon preserving their phone batteries by trying to unravel each other. Ada revealed a little about the nineteen-year-old girl from last summer. They only hooked up twice, but it was special. Better than anything she's felt to this day. Said she didn't know what was happening with Apollo, but it was nice to be held by hands that weren't pale.Above the house, their thighs touched then the sun started setting and goosebumps prickled up. Ada ran the back of her hand up Sydney's leg and said, "I forget you're morena clara."A few minutes before the bell chimes, Ada's hand returns to Sydney's knee. Red light, Sydney thinks, willing the hand to finger-walk its way up, for Ada to whisper Firetrucks don't stop for red lights. Ada's talking about an assignment to write a poem from the perspective of a WWI soldier, begging Sydney to write hers.Sydney's never been kissed, but last weekend she said she had. Pressed for any secret, she wanted to hurt Ada back. Wouldn't give a name or pronoun, just that it was sloppy. Ada absorbed it without emotion, the helixes of their ears clasped together. Sydney imagined the sound of an ocean made of wax and spit. She stared up into the sky and asked to be returned to a home with no one in it.Sydney wants to barter for the poem, but can't conjure anything she'd receive in the trade. Ada shakes her head when Sydney tries to deny her. At her desk, Ms. Duluth stretches up, and Sydney sees the white toss of stomach. Sydney could place her hand on top of Ada's and wait. Wait for any reaction. Sydney could write the ode to Ada and their baby, tan and never-shaken, named and virtuous.

Alexandria Juarez

Ada and Syd

Abstract Trigger warnings, statements alerting readers, listeners, or viewers to the presence of content that might revive distressing memories, have become a flash point in recent discussions about the US academy. Providing a genealogy of the concept and practice in US colleges and universities, this article situates the trigger warning's growing cultural prominence within twined changes in computer-mediated communication and legal understandings of embodied consent. Seen against this backdrop of racialized, gendered struggles over the meanings of free, voluntary action, the trigger warning debate helps illuminate how the normative regimes of the contemporary university reflect the long afterlife of US racial slavery.

Rebecca M. Herzig

Trigger Warning

Lindy Conners woke up dead on the day she would have turned twenty-five. For a single blissful moment, she remained oblivious to her new state. She stretched her arms and legs out across the mattress, reveling in the luxury, the cocoon of the warm sheets. As she continued to lie there, however, and the five more minutes she had promised herself in bed ticked away, awareness of her own death filled her slowly, like light filling a room. It did seem strange to her that this transformation from living to dead had taken place without leaving her a memory of panic or pain, yet she could not deny its consequence. For she felt a stillness in her body that went beyond mere sleepiness. Her bloodstream itself stood still. Her systems and cellular processes and her inner electricity had all slowed to silence. No heartbeat contracted in her chest, just as no pulse tapped a panicked rhythm in her neck, wrist, or fingertips. She sat up, somewhat perturbed, and chanced a look at her reflection in the mirror above the bureau. No blush anointed her cheeks, not even when she pinched them. Her lips possessed a faintly bluish hue. Moreover, the cold tension in her muscles never abated, even as she stretched her arms a second time and swung her feet out of the bed. If anything, she felt heavier, leaden. The blood pooled and mottled her legs.Although Lindy had no choice but to acknowledge that she had died, she was not altogether certain what to do with this information, so she did as routine dictated. She brushed her teeth and dressed, and she pinned up her long hair. As she was pulling on her jacket, she considered the possibility that this was simply what the act of dying was. Perhaps all people experienced natural deaths this way and did not know it, and Lindy herself only felt more keenly aware of her own demise for that intimate way in which she remained acutely aware of what it was to inhabit her body at all times, sucking in her stomach, self-correcting her posture, and finger-combing her flyaway hairs when strangers looked her way in store aisles.Now Lindy headed downstairs to tip food into the cat's dish and give it a scratch behind its clipped left ear. The cat shied away from her fingertips at first, put off by the faint odor of decomposition under her nails. Only out of greed did it dare to sally near again, even nipping at Lindy's finger in an effort to steal a treat. The cat followed Lindy around, tail switching, as she called work to let them know she'd be taking a sick day. When the phone began to ring, however, Lindy realized that the word sick did not sound right to her, and so she settled on bereavement instead. Her ability to still use logic at this crucial junction put her at ease, at least until the phone call ended, at which point she admitted she now had no idea what to do with the day. The people she cared most for were all at work at this hour, and while she knew she ought to explain her situation to someone, the nature of it being her birthday meant no one would take her assertion that she was dead seriously. They'd call her a dramatic and a hysteric and say they'd see her Friday, when they all went out for drinks.Lindy's cat lurked in front of the bookshelf, licking its black lips. Lindy shooed it away and pondered the spines of the volumes there. What book did one read—what movie did one watch—what meal did one eat after they had died already? She felt no pleasure at all at the promise of any of it, and every book she picked up and flipped to the last page of, she'd slam shut again. Dissatisfied, and not a little ashamed to know the end.Finally, she fished her car keys from the bowl, grabbed a stack of envelopes from a kitchen drawer, and drove to a park south of town. There, two retired women played tennis on the courts. The leaf-dotted grass needed a trim. For a long while, Lindy merely sat on a bench and studied the wind through that grass, allowing the thwump of the tennis ball to mimic the sound of her missing pulse. This self-deception could not last, of course, and after some time Lindy returned to the car. She did not leave right away. Instead, she wrote letters to her loved ones against the steering wheel. She had to scrawl them on the envelopes themselves, since she'd forgotten other paper. More unfortunately, every word she wrote in an attempt to explain her passing smacked of suicide, as the letters would make it look to everyone else she'd known of her death before the fact. With every draft, and with every discarded envelope, Lindy found the truth more and more impossible to convey. She did not want anyone to think that she had killed herself—not because she would never have done so, but because she would have done so once, and had not gone through with it in the end.By the time she gave up the letters completely, her fingers had stiffened, and a faint smell emanated from her pores, that scent of decay aggravated by the sunlight trapped by the closed car windows. Outside, beyond the glare, trees swayed back and forth. Their autumn leaves rustled like golden monarchs and brown moths, insects all flurrying together like a cacophony of wings. Above, the sky's emptiness—its perfect clarity, its hue of crisp blue—made Lindy think she ought to feel something more profound by now. Where was her grief, her loss, her anguish, that she had died so young? Those feelings seemed strange to her and even sealed off inside her now, like the inside of a seed. Shouldn't she weep at the prospect that, by nightfall, she'd be too noticeably dead to continue as she was, and, in consequence, might never meet a lovely sky or a summer day ever again? She tried in vain to summon up the appropriate despair. Even thoughts of her coffin shut around her stirred in her only slight distaste. At last, she turned the key in the ignition so she would not have to think at all, and she left the park behind her.She drove from the cardboard storefronts and graffitied lots of the city to some suburb, bound for nowhere in particular except, perhaps, the unremarkable landmarks of strangers' childhoods: plastic pools strewn with leaves, merry-go-rounds revolving slowly, creakily, covered with rust that flaked away when one removed one's hands. She listened to the radio as she drove, which was out of the ordinary for her. She half-expected the news to break in with some story about a dead woman drifting down the streets, or with a flash that some asteroid had struck earth and destroyed all life on the planet at once.No such luck. It was late afternoon by the time Lindy pulled over again, this time in her mother's driveway, though the mother in question was still at work and not at home. The young woman waited there, listening to radio commercials at first and then to the hits from a half a century ago. She wondered at how many of the voices on those airwaves were dead too, and what it meant that she could hear them still, when they'd never lived a year of overlap. At some point, she blinked her heavy eyelids with some difficulty—a certain gumminess lined them now—and realized once she wrenched them open once more that a rose-colored dusk had settled like dust over the car.She forced herself out of the vehicle and stood in the driveway under the sunset. She admired the pink flush that light cast over her arm, like blood still worked within her. Had she wasted it? she asked herself. And if so, what had it been? The hour, the day, the year, the life, the damned quietness of it, its contentness, its solitude, all of it without a truly worthy misery, all of it without a star."Honey?"Her mother switched the headlights off and got out of the car behind Lindy's. The lines on the hand that rested on the door, the simple blue cardigan she wore, at last wrenched the feeling free from Lindy. She knew a grown-up woman was too old to lie down in her mother's lap, or to cry on birthdays, but—and it happened between the moment when her mother began to cross the yard and when that same mother hugged her, held her, and did not know, did not suspect for even a second, that her daughter was dead—Lindy felt the incredible and spiraling loss of this person, as closest she could come to feeling the loss of herself. All at once, the girl felt like weeping, and she searched for how she could possibly articulate what had happened to her, searched for how she could say goodbye."Oh, Lindy, what's the matter?""Nothing," she hiccupped, "nothing!"And to this, her mother said soothingly, "Why don't you stay here tonight?"But this only made Lindy weep harder, a choked mantra of, "I can't, I can't," for she knew there would be no use or good in that, that she was gone already.

Katelyn Pike

Lindy Conners Has a Quarter Death Crisis

the voice was pre-sold. forget that. she opened insteadwith three feet of red hair, oiled and braided, shearedfrom the root to keep the length. the sea-witch smiled:not enough. the crown, then, and the twisting silverbracelets. the gown of watered silk so fine it scorchedin sunlight. more? the diamond collar from her throat,gold rings like turtle bones, the pearl stud in her left ear,and then the ear itself, fleshy and curled like a seashell,carved away so sweetly, hardly any blood. ah,said the sea-witch. now we have progress. more.

ariel goes home

I worked at an immigration law clinic introduced to me by a mural. It was painted by a Venezuelan migrant who had lost a child in the Parkland massacre. The weekend of the commission, someone else visited El Paso and left Walmart with a shotgun and twenty-three bodies. I've been to that Walmart without staining my shoes. I don't remember much about the mural except that it was beautiful.There were concrete walls in the pool in Hedingam, the neighborhood before the headlines. My swim cap was latex instead of silicone. I saw sunscreened children and parents and Subway sandwiches with layered mayonnaise tomatoes. Back then I'd covered my arm with Sharpie. Later it was brother shooting brother and dead dog on the porch next to a woman who greeted everyone. To blame was the pandemic, inflation, mental illness, Ukraine, gasoline prices, really, for a face, baby with whiteness and nursed by shotgun. I don't remember much else about that swim meet except the sting of my back and a girl with a father arrested for poolside meetings with a teenager. Now they're investigating the shooter's family. In Hedingham fathers are punished. In El Paso a father is painting.I worked at a migrant shelter introduced to me by its survivors. Border Patrol shot a nineteen-year-old boy in the street next to our doors some years ago and no one was charged because he had been walking. Today the police officer is killed by the gunman. Tomorrow the gunman is the police officer. Always the nineteen-year-old passes away.

Lily Levin

Convenience Store Eulogy

I asked my mother to do the impossible:drive me to school with sun-tender migraines,make pancakes when the antidepressantsleft her brittle like a sidewalk leaf.She tried to explain it was like asking herto have a limb she was missing.Please have a leg became her shorthandto say she wanted these things so badlybut couldn't. After the divorce, my fathergot injured on the job—not a machineon the factory floor, but the handof a friend pulling a chair from under him.He never told the friend. Couldn't sleeplying down, could only grocery shop leanedon a Walmart cart for a walker. My churchsaid the traveling faith healer could help.I thought him like a car on a lift. If the healerplaced his palm at the bow of my father's backand only if his faith was exact in measureand kind would he be made whole, holy.But my father never went. His belief in miraclesstopped before himself. I watched a teen boymy age with a limp receive hands every yearand the boy's familiar forehead sweatwhen the healer pushed him to walk too fast,declared the boy's self-harm a miracle. I imaginehe rested for days for the performance of faith,for the quick-pedaling across the stage when the healerspittled into the wireless mic that this was the powerof choosing to believe. That this was power.

Chrissy Martin

Laying Hands

Abstract This introduction provides a short survey of the history of academic culture wars as a recurring phenomenon in the history of the modern university. It then outlines the concept of this special section as a nonpartisan and metaperspectival critical discussion of various selected aspects and historical manifestations of the multifaceted phenomenon of academic culture wars, concluding with a brief overview of the individual contributions.

Florian Zappe

Introduction

The moment before you know: the smell of tomato stalks in the garden, the network of pulsing earthworms. Summer hangs over the neighborhood like a piñata about to burst. It is Tuesday and the children are on the coast with their nanny, Meredith. Won't be back for three days. Your gloves have gone mucky inside from sweat. A sparrow skips across the lawn.The moment you know: the wind lifts suddenly, sparkling the wind chime hung over the porch. The backdoor opens, and Mrs. Peterson steps out of the house, her thighs rigid in linen slacks, her ankles thin like a doll's. She smiles, and it is like the photograph you have seen of her in college, the navy swimsuit, medal clutched in her hand, her mouth curled like she's about to laugh. Looking at her numbs the tips of your fingers. She does not call to you, doesn't say your name. She steps onto the porch and descends into the garden, and in a moment that feels outside of time the wind blows into her, her hair spins out from her head. You see, only at first you think you imagine it, a small purple mark on her neck like a bruise, just under the jaw.The Petersons pay you well to keep a beautiful garden. This time of year, you bring them handfuls of cherry tomatoes, dark zucchinis, bouquets of stiff-necked garlic from their own backyard. Some nights they invite you to take dinner with them. Little Jeremy always tugging at the cuffs of your shirt, asking to look at your fingernails. All summer they cannot believe your talent, your green thumb. All summer you tell them, just wait. The garden will be beautiful in autumn.She has a plan. Her perfume has notes of jasmine in it. For the first time she touches you, fingertips grazing your elbow briefly, which is more than enough. Mr. Peterson comes home from work at precisely six forty-five. When he does, she is waiting in the kitchen, chicken soup rolling on the stove, the smell of celery stalks and meat almost unbearable. The back of her neck glitters with sweat. You stand with your spine pressed against the wall, out of sight to him through the tall archway. Barely breathing. The square shovel slippery in your hands. When the front door opens he calls through the house, My god, that smells incredible.Mrs. Peterson keeps her back turned, even as you take the swing. Her husband lets out a small, wet sound and folds to the floor. A leak inches out from his head.Mrs. Peterson shuts off the stove.Just three hours until sunset—you wait inside the house, the curtains drawn. Mrs. Peterson goes upstairs and returns in jeans you've never seen before. They have one small hole, not fashionable, on the left knee. You tuck a black towel patterned with red surfboards—a favorite of the children, always taken to the lake—under his head to protect the floors. Despite the heat, the two of you drink soup from clammy spoons, chew sinews of chicken. Mrs. Peterson touches the inside of her wrist when she catches you looking, the spot where a gold watch usually sits. But she has taken it all off now, all her usual decorations, even the ring.You have built your body for this, unknowingly. Seasons of labor hardened to muscle, strength formed like layers of a tree. In the darkness your two shadows slink into the garden, down the pebbled path that winds through arches of well-trained ivy, wisteria, and sweet peas. The air is thick and wet, a physical thing you have to push through, even with the wind still blowing to the east. In a few weeks the okra will be ready, the cucumber, the heirloom tomatoes.The shed stands like a ghost at the end of the garden, patient and pale. Mrs. Peterson steps inside before you, and you reach around her for the light. Yellow shudders over everything. A thread of shame tugs in your stomach to see the mess you've left, the look on her face as she surveys the cluttered room.There is another shovel, she says. Yes?You point it out and she yanks it from behind the rake.You start the hole. Behind the shed, sheltered by hedges. From the neighboring windows you are nearly invisible—that is what you tell her when she hesitates. With the square lip of your shovel, you knife the soil apart, forcing space into the packed dirt. The smell of earth becomes overwhelming, nearly sour. For some time you square out the length of the plot, the same way you dug the trenches for the beds last spring. Mrs. Peterson clears her throat when it seems big enough, and you step to the side so that she can dig half while you dig the other. After only a few minutes she has to stop to stretch out her hands.She asks, how much further? And even in the darkness you can see the front of her shirt has gone translucent, the air muggy and mosquito ridden. You say, a few more feet. Because sometimes raccoons come by. A few times a year, someone spots a band of coyotes arrowing through the street.When it is done and you are standing in it, Mrs. Peterson's feet are in line with your eyes. You shove yourself out of the hole like a swimmer coming out of a pool. Mrs. Peterson offers her hand and her palm is swollen with blisters. She has been crying, you see now. But you aren't done yet. There is still Mr. Peterson inside.Will you get him, she asks.And you are imagining next week's harvest. How the dark opal basil has done so well this year. That you ought to pick the calendulas to whip the rich golden cream Mrs. Peterson likes to rub into her arms, her face. She turns toward the house and one panel of her buttoned shirt lifts from her stomach in the breeze.Across the skin, a belted stain runs up to her ribs. Her belly button is small as a coin slot.You tell her, Stay right here.The house waits in darkness. Every noise sucked out of it: no children or nanny or husband or wife. The furniture makes man-shaped silhouettes in the dark. Your blood shivers like a fish; your toes lose feeling. You have to think of the poppies and lavender outside, the rich smell of bush-like rosemary, to walk. He is where you left him, the lake towel under his head, his body fallen in a way that looks arranged. You have the feeling you are creeping up on him as he sleeps, that he might jolt awake. This man, who you almost never see. He has a moustache, you see now. Dark, bovine eyelashes.Mrs. Peterson was the one to put out the ad for a gardener. The memory of her then, sitting on her porch in a cream turtleneck stirring apple tea with a spoon, feels like a needle pressed into your chest between two ribs.There is a different memory, of course. Of Mr. Peterson, your first summer. When you were building trellises for snap peas to climb, and through the wide back windows of the house you thought you saw him move toward his wife like a snake. That evening when you were done she did not come downstairs to pay you. The cash was left in a soft blue envelope by the door. And for weeks the image of him lurching replayed like a projection over everything. And you never asked her about it, even when you were alone.Now he is something new to bury. Something to seed and pray it never grows. You tie a plastic bag from under the kitchen sink over the towel and his head to keep him from staining the floors and porch, and with great effort drag him outside.When you have him at the edge of the hole, you can no longer see the bottom. His feet hang over the edge. Mrs. Peterson hesitates, keeping the tip of her shovel planted between her feet.Together you lever your shovels under him, prepared to tip him in.Then Mrs. Peterson gasps and yanks back her shovel.Oh god, she says. And fear flutters through you again.Mr. Peterson is trying for air, the plastic bag sucking against his face.He is not moving, just struggling to breathe. You see his chest beg to expand. Your shovel is still in your hands, still lodged under one of his shoulders. Striking him in the kitchen had been one thing. Your limbs harden, fossilize.You think if she just reached for you, if her hand moved back to your elbow, that you could do it. You could lift the blade and swing it down with a great motivated force. But she does not move. She takes one step back. The plastic bag makes a terrible wheezing noise. Mr. Peterson groans like a dog. When his arm moves, you almost don't notice. It is a twitch, and then a swipe. You jump out of his reach just in time. His hand shakes toward the bag.Oh god, whispers Mrs. Peterson. Daniel?He stills at her voice. Mrs. Peterson loses her color and kneels beside him, her hands fluttering, trying to rip off the bag. You look back at the dim house, its ivory trim. Delicious green crawls up the porch posts, wide spades of field bindweed pirouetting into the eaves. You have a craving for wild rocket, yellow carrots, fistfuls of earthy dill. Next week you will begin planting again.Yes, it will be beautiful here in autumn.You bite the shovel under Mr. Peterson's shoulders and push down against the handle. Just as Mrs. Peterson splits the plastic bag and her husband breathes, his torso lifts, his calves fall over the edge, and gravity sucks him into the pit. His body lands with a thud.Mrs. Peterson says, No! And scuttles toward the edge of the hole.But you are planting. You hold out your shovel to block her, and she flinches back like she had that first summer, when you were watching through the windows. You have dug all year for this. Lifted mulch and dragged wheelbarrows and tugged rotten mats of weed from the ground. You dump dirt over Mr. Peterson as he makes small animal sounds. Then the weight is too heavy and he stills. Mrs. Peterson begins to cry and you hush softly to her, tell her all the crops that will feed on this spot, the vibrant, fertilized buds that will push up for air. Her breathing grows more panicked. But you are serene, working how your body has learned to work. Packing the soil, preparing the land.

Emily Pegg

Beautiful in Autumn

Other| November 01 2023 The Dead Tree Alysia Gonzales Alysia Gonzales Alysia Gonzales is a writer born, raised, and living in San Francisco. She received an MFA in fiction from San Francisco State University, and her work is published in The Ana, The Acentos Review, and Seventh Wave Magazine. Her work has also been supported by the San Francisco Writers Grotto’s Rooted & Written Conference, the Yefe Nof Residency, the Rhinebeck Residency, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google the minnesota review (2023) 2023 (101): 36–40. https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770170 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Alysia Gonzales; The Dead Tree. the minnesota review 1 November 2023; 2023 (101): 36–40. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770170 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsthe minnesota review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2023 Alysia Gonzales2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Alysia Gonzales

The Dead Tree

In the 2010s social justice workers and incarcerated men of color worked on a book project that would be published as Life Sentences in 2019. As one of the editors of Life Sentences, the author of this article looks back at the process, considering its authors, creativity behind bars, and working with imprisoned writers. What can we learn from free minds in extremely taxing, degrading, and depressing circumstances? What does creative work mean for embodied lives serving (more than) life sentences? The book works toward a way to restore and rebuild justice, and it shows us the power of imagination as not just a creative but also a spiritual force.

Elaine Frantz

Writing Life Sentences

Other| November 01 2023 Shedding Neha Mulay Neha Mulay Neha Mulay is a New York–based writer and editor. Her poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Maine Review, and SAND Journal, among other publications. Her essays have appeared in Feminartsy, Overland, and elsewhere. She is content editor at The Adroit Journal. She holds an MFA in creative writing from New York University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google the minnesota review (2023) 2023 (101): 21–22. https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770121 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Neha Mulay; Shedding. the minnesota review 1 November 2023; 2023 (101): 21–22. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770121 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsthe minnesota review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2023 Neha Mulay2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Neha Mulay

Shedding

Other| November 01 2023 The Secret of Tornadoes Kevin Grauke Kevin Grauke Kevin Grauke has published work in such places as the Threepenny Review, Southern Review, Quarterly West, Cimarron Review, and Ninth Letter. He is the author of the short-story collection Shadows of Men (2012), and he teaches at La Salle University in Philadelphia. Find him on Twitter: @kevingrauke. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google the minnesota review (2023) 2023 (101): 27. https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770149 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kevin Grauke; The Secret of Tornadoes. the minnesota review 1 November 2023; 2023 (101): 27. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770149 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsthe minnesota review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2023 Kevin Grauke2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Creative You do not currently have access to this content.

Kevin Grauke

The Secret of Tornadoes

Other| November 01 2023 Bread Making for Beginners Nylah Lyman Nylah Lyman Nylah Lyman is the author of Frail Union (2021), a book-length collection of poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, Hunger Mountain, and South Carolina Review, as well as other journals. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google the minnesota review (2023) 2023 (101): 3. https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770086 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Nylah Lyman; Bread Making for Beginners. the minnesota review 1 November 2023; 2023 (101): 3. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770086 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsthe minnesota review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2023 Nylah Lyman2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Nylah Lyman

Bread Making for Beginners

Other| November 01 2023 Abecedarian for These Trying Times (aka all the time) Matthew Moniz Matthew Moniz Matthew Moniz teaches English at Mississippi University for Women. Originally from the DC area, Matt has work appearing in or forthcoming from The Iowa Review, Crab Orchard Review, Meridian, Tupelo Quarterly, and Fourteen Hills. He has been awarded Poetry by the Sea’s Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Crown Contest prize and the SCMLA Poetry Prize.. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google the minnesota review (2023) 2023 (101): 24. https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770135 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Matthew Moniz; Abecedarian for These Trying Times (aka all the time). the minnesota review 1 November 2023; 2023 (101): 24. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770135 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsthe minnesota review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2023 Matthew Moniz2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Matthew Moniz

Abecedarian for These Trying Times (aka all the time)

Other| November 01 2023 Agdistis III Jie Cohen Jie Cohen 婕 Jie Cohen is a mixed, intersex creator whose work explores the intersections of surrealism and identity. Their writing and visual arts have been recognized or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sycamore Review, The Foundationalist, Nat-Brut, Singapore Unbound, Boston Fashion Week, POETS.org, and others. Their poem “PRANKPHONECALLS” was selected as the winner of the Gertrude Claytor Award for Best Poem in 2021, and they were awarded the Naomi Kitay Creative Writing Fellowship in 2022. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google the minnesota review (2023) 2023 (101): 10. https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770100 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jie Cohen; Agdistis III. the minnesota review 1 November 2023; 2023 (101): 10. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770100 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsthe minnesota review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2023 Jie Cohen2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Jie Cohen

Agdistis III

This article argues that Mao’s writing on contradiction and cultural revolution allows us to understand Zionism in a unique Marxist perspective, as a failed cultural revolution. The author first presents Mao’s writing on contradictions, and the historical interactions among them, and then elaborates Mao’s understanding of cultural revolution, emphasizing Fredric Jameson’s appropriation of it as the second moment of revolution: the transformation of human practice after the seizure of power. The article argues that Zionism can be understood, first, as a Maoist intervention into a primary political contradiction: the exclusion of Jews from European capitalist society. Once Zionism becomes a hegemonic power, its failure to achieve socialism can be considered a failure of cultural revolution. Such understanding of Zionism makes it possible to see it as part of global predicament: a result of capitalism’s continued existence rather than an arbitrary colonial evil.

Oded Nir

Zionism as a Failed Cultural Revolution

Other| November 01 2023 The Wild Self Matt Gulley Matt Gulley Matt Gulley attended Wayne State University in Detroit and currently resides in Brooklyn with his girlfriend, Jenna. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Moon City Review, The Madrigal, Blood Tree Literature, and Hawai‘i Pacific Review. Find him @selfawareroomba on Twitter or @mattgulley.bsky.social on Bluesky. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google the minnesota review (2023) 2023 (101): 19–20. https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770114 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Matt Gulley; The Wild Self. the minnesota review 1 November 2023; 2023 (101): 19–20. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770114 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsthe minnesota review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2023 Matt Gulley2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Matt Gulley

The Wild Self

Thematically speaking, this theoretical article draws on Vilém Flusser’s work on dialogue, the apparatus, and functionalism and Gilles Deleuze’s work on control societies, cybernetic machines, and lines of flight to problematize creativity. While promoting creativity, autocreativity, metacreativity, and ludic creativity, it also cautions against the co-optation of creativity and metacreativity by apparatuses or cybernetic systems. It argues for the rejuvenation of self and world alike and calls for a minor sensibility (in a Deleuzean sense), a collective ethical awakening, and a shift toward an ecocivilization. There is an irreducible East Asian and an important interological dimension to the article. At a formal level, the article is meant as a textual body without organs (BwO) or a Taiji- (Tai chi-) style text, which privileges the flow of textual energy over structural clarity and classicality. As such, the reader is invited to go with the flow.

Peter Zhang

Creativity in a Minor Key

This article is part reflection on how academic disciplines can stymie creative scholarship and part critical effort to break out of that orientation to reclaim the author’s personal passion for mermaids as subject for scholarly analysis. Pressman argues that contemporary mermaid literature has much to tell us about our most pressing social, cultural, and political issues. This article takes as its starting point the racist backlash over Disney’s 2019 casting announcement for its 2023 feature film and the 2020 antiracist graffiti on The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen as the complex site for assessing the entanglements and inner workings of cultural memory. Following Rita Felski’s call to pursue attachment over critical detachment in scholarship, this article enacts creative-critical attention via a focus on mermaids in contemporary public discourse.

Jessica Pressman

Hooked on Mermaids

“Rouse the Ruse and the Rush” is a long poetic sequence the author composed between 2020 and 2021, amidst various waves of COVID-19 outbreaks and the acceleration of “pro-life” efforts in the United States to restrict access to abortions at local levels and, ultimately, to overturn Roe v. Wade at a national level. The primary motif of this poem is the work of eighteenth-century Dutch still-life painter Rachel Ruysch. Through creatively rendering (or reworking) her images, alongside other sources, into lyric verse, the poet attempts to produce textual and sonic arrangements akin to Ruysch’s floral bouquets and referencing the (fetal) anatomical dioramas created by her father, Frederik Ruysch. The poet aims to mobilize the creative mode of linguistic inquiry, poetry, to build a new vocabulary for attending to and grieving both living and nonliving things without reinforcing modern valorizations of individual property and personhood, which have mired and limited recent debates on “bodily autonomy” and have allowed the phrase my body, my choice to be wielded by both the Left and the Right for very different purposes. The entirety of the sequence is published here, preceded by an exegetical essay.

Mia You

Mobilizing Still Life and Still Lives through Lyric

Other| November 01 2023 Empire Builders Loretta McCormick Loretta McCormick Loretta McCormick earned her PhD in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee in May 2022. While studying at UWM, she taught composition and creative writing and served as editor in chief of Cream City Review. Her fiction and critical work explore intersections of myth and science within the context of disability, gender, and death care in American culture and have been published in Deaf Poets Society, Wordgathering, Betwixt, decomp journal, Cultural Daily, and elsewhere. She is currently the tutoring coordinator for the Writing and Humanities Tutoring Center at Santa Monica College. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google the minnesota review (2023) 2023 (101): 11–18. https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770107 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Loretta McCormick; Empire Builders. the minnesota review 1 November 2023; 2023 (101): 11–18. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770107 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsthe minnesota review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2023 Loretta McCormick2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Loretta McCormick

Empire Builders

In examining Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People (2017), this article employs a materialist framework to develop a broader critical perspective that addresses the impact of global power on emerging narratives of labor migration. In engaging both aesthetic and material elements, it examines how Unnikrishnan offers an alternative to what is described as the “mythology of migrancy” narrative. As such, the article challenges the dominant paradigm of migration in postcolonial studies, which tends to celebrate hybridity and fluidity of identity. Unnikrishnan responds aesthetically to dominant migration discourse through his deliberate narrative strategy of building his short stories around different experiences of exploited and estranged individuals who are often positioned outside the narrative itself. The article establishes two focuses: one historical, the other literary. First, it addresses the relationships among global capitalism, oil, and immigration in the Arabian Gulf. Second, it explores how Temporary People creates a new aesthetic mode to narrate the struggle of temporary migrants.

Raya Alraddadi

Challenging Migration Narratives in Deepak Unnikrishnan’s <i>Temporary People</i>

Research Article| November 01 2023 By Way of Introduction: Creativity as Counterknowledge Kiene Brillenburg Wurth; Kiene Brillenburg Wurth Kiene Brillenburg Wurth is professor of literature and comparative media, head of the Department of Comparative Literature, and head of the MA program Medical Humanities at Utrecht University. She has developed interdisciplinary research lines into intermediality, creativity, and experimental art and literature. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Bregje F. van Eekelen; Bregje F. van Eekelen Bregje F. van Eekelen is professor of design, culture and society at the Delft University of Technology, with a dual appointment at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She uses a combination of historical and anthropological approaches to the study of concepts, most notably concepts that are situated in the contact zone of design, economy, and society (e.g., creativity, failure, interdisciplinarity). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Iris van der Tuin; Iris van der Tuin Iris van der Tuin is professor of theory of cultural inquiry in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University, where she is also university-wide dean for interdisciplinary education. Her research interest is humanities scholarship that integrates science and technology studies, interdisciplinary studies, and creative methods. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Nanna Verhoeff Nanna Verhoeff Nanna Verhoeff is professor of screen cultures and society in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. Her research on urban media combines perspectives from (digital) media and performance studies and contributes to the interdisciplinary methodological development of the creative humanities. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google the minnesota review (2023) 2023 (101): 79–83. https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770191 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Bregje F. van Eekelen, Iris van der Tuin, Nanna Verhoeff; By Way of Introduction: Creativity as Counterknowledge. the minnesota review 1 November 2023; 2023 (101): 79–83. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770191 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsthe minnesota review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2023 Virginia Tech2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

Bregje F. van Eekelen

Iris van der Tuin

Nanna Verhoeff

By Way of Introduction

Other| November 01 2023 Nick Anna Karras Anna Karras Anna Karras is a writer, librarian, and coffee enthusiast. She loves everything to do with art, history, and travel. When not writing, she can be found rabidly knitting socks. She lives in southwest Florida with her crazy Greek husband. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google the minnesota review (2023) 2023 (101): 28–34. https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770156 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Anna Karras; Nick. the minnesota review 1 November 2023; 2023 (101): 28–34. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770156 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsthe minnesota review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2023 Anna Karras2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Creative You do not currently have access to this content.

Anna Karras

Nick

Other| November 01 2023 How to Date During the Climate Apocalypse Cameron Vanderwerf Cameron Vanderwerf Cameron Vanderwerf is a Boston-based writer. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Delta Review, Southern Humanities Review, Worcester Review, Moon City Review, Write Launch, Every Day Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine, and other publications. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Hollins University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google the minnesota review (2023) 2023 (101): 25–26. https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770142 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Cameron Vanderwerf; How to Date During the Climate Apocalypse. the minnesota review 1 November 2023; 2023 (101): 25–26. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770142 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsthe minnesota review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2023 Cameron Vanderwerf2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Cameron Vanderwerf

How to Date During the Climate Apocalypse

Other| November 01 2023 Man at the Bar Asks Me Where I’m From Mara Beneway Mara Beneway Mara Beneway is a writer, visual artist, and teacher from New York. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Bennington Review, Conduit, Foglifter, and elsewhere. Her collection of linked flash fiction, Grandma June, won the Flume Press 2021 Chapbook competition. She holds an MFA from the University of South Florida and is currently working on her first book, a full-length collection of poetry titled “DAUGHTERS OF LILITH.” Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google the minnesota review (2023) 2023 (101): 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770077 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mara Beneway; Man at the Bar Asks Me Where I’m From. the minnesota review 1 November 2023; 2023 (101): 1–2. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10770077 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsthe minnesota review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2023 Mara Beneway2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

短名	the minnesota review
Journal Impact	0.28
期刊索引	中科院 3 区

ISSN	0026-5667, 2157-4189
h-index	11
国内分区	文学(3区)文学文学评论(1区)

涉及主题	历史艺术哲学社会学政治学计算机科学
出版信息	出版商: University of Missouri - Columbia, Department of English，出版周期: ，期刊类型: journal
基本数据	创刊年份: 2009，原创研究文献占比: 100.00%，自引率:0.00%， Gold OA占比: 0.00%

Minnesota Review

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