Here's What Resonated with You in 2020
While we don't believe in best of lists, we went through our content over the past year and saw what resonated most with you, our readers, across our different genres and sections. Here's what you loved:
Photography: Joanna C. Valente - “Social Distance Photos of a Brooklyn Neighborhood During COVID-19”
Fiction: Christina Rosso - “The Wives’ Grave”
I swallow acidic saliva, feeling it travel down my throat. I know my husband means it. My palms are clammy and pebbled with perspiration. He takes a step towards me, his eyes locked on mine. The knife gleams silver-white in the fluorescent lighting. I imagine the blood of the wives before me, thick and dark like the air before a storm. He kneels until we’re eye-to-eye. My husband presses the blade to my throat. My breath halts against its coolness.
I know I’m going to die.
#MeToo Series: Shira Dentz - “Slide”
“Sometimes my father would be there, any second grabbing to hold me down to plunder with wet loud kissing while I screamed and scrambled to get away but finally couldn’t protest because his body took away my breath. There was always this threat while he was there.”
Chapbook: Dead Tongue (poetry: Bunkong Tuon; ilustrations: Joanna C. Valente)
Music: A Playlist for Beginnings & Ends
Poet of the Month series - Jiaoyang Li: September 2020
“we keep going
because we have places to be today
and errands don’t stop for seeping regret”
Essay: Monique Quintana - “Black Licorice”
“The happiest story you’ll ever write will be the one with the prince in the snow. You’ll collect short stories about snow because it never snows in your city. Your favorite story will be “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow.” You’ll watch as your classmates make papier-mâché masks of their heroes. You’ll fall in love with the white boy who makes his mask out of glass. He’ll put up posters of Christ with machine guns and bombs on his back and he’ll get detention for it. You’ll pretend not remember his name the day after he graduates. You’ll forget his name all together.
You’ll regret giving your son a biblical name, and he’ll regret it in twos. You’ll watch him sketch cowboy spurs after he splashes his face with holy water at San Juan Bautista. You’ll like to go there in springtime and eat albondigas soup and take pictures walking through flowers and cacti. You’ll see a radio poet you don’t like there and you’ll give each other the death stare and it’ll feel two times good to you.”
Poetry: Anuel Rodriguez - “It Comes at Night”
“Because a dog is smart
enough to trick the devil into agreeing to count
every single hair on his fur coat before he
can enter the house to harm the family.
And each night the sun rises before
the devil can finish counting hairs and
the light eventually chases him away until darkness
falls again. I still think about that story
years later. I never kept a dog as a pet.”
Interview: Marcus Jade
Writing Prompts: Who Are You?
Review: Candice Kelsey - “Finding the Boy: A Review of Adedayo Agarau’s 'The Arrival of Rain'“
“In the pivotal piece, “How to Love a Bird Right Back into the Sky,” Agarau juxtaposes “a gun in the head” with a “bird in the mirror” and “a war three oceans away” with “morning dews sitting at the tip of a tongue.” But these images are merely prelude to his meditation on the difference between the superficial and the eternal.
Here he begins his study of the mouth; he dismisses the girlfriends whose mouths have both tasted and alienated his body by prophesying his failures. The same lips that “wrapp[ed] their lips” around him tell him he is but “a plantation of seasoned blues.” Indignant, he answers them with mention of his grandmother’s first kiss, her eternal mouth affirming that he in fact “is home.”
Her voice arrives as rain.”
Wellness: Stephanie Athena Valente - “How to Conjure Poetry Magic in Self-Care”
“From my personal experience, self-care and personal magic is an extremely individualized experience. I didn’t come to understand the power of self-care and my inner witch until I started to rebuild my life after the trauma of a violent relationship with an intimate partner.
Magic and self-work started on a hot summer night in July. I recently moved into a studio in Brooklyn I could hardly afford. I was working a new job for barely over two weeks. Three months prior to that, my entire life turned upside down.
I was suffering and I was grieving. I felt like a broken person. I spent years in an emotionally abusive relationship that turned physically abusive. It ended violently. I almost died. My entire being was shell shocked. When I moved into my own apartment after leaving my abuser, I was shaken. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was so grateful to have my studio apartment, my dog, and peace. And all I could see was empty space.
In my first few nights in the apartment, I didn’t realize how much healing with poetry magic would be discovered in the coming months. I casually referred to myself as a witch for a few years by then. But, I had zero confidence. My low self-esteem and emotional and physical trauma had me so closed off from a spiritual practice. I had spent the last few years just trying to survive and walk on eggshells around my abuser. I didn’t have time to really think about what witchcraft meant to me, let alone grow into a magical environment.”
