Baghdad, Iraq, 1956. Joseph Chelhod

I think as your job satisfaction gets lower and lower you should gain access to an increasingly broad and powerful suite of forbidden magic

Quarantine

by Eavan Boland

In the worst hour of the worst season of the worst year of a whole people a man set out from the workhouse with his wife. He was walking — they were both walking — north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up. He lifted her and put her on his back. He walked like that west and west and north. Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead. Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history. But her feet were held against his breastbone. The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold. There is no place here for the inexact praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body. There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847. Also what they suffered. How they lived. And what there is between a man and woman. And in which darkness it can best be proved.

An Interview with Hanif Abdurraqib

Dark Charms

by Dorianne Laux

Eventually the future shows up everywhere: those burly summers and unslept nights in deep lines and dark splotches, thinning skin. Here’s the corner store grown to a condo, the bike reduced to one spinning wheel, the ghost of a dog that used to be, her trail no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds. The clear water we drank as thirsty children still runs through our veins. Stars we saw then we still see now, only fewer, dimmer, less often. The old tunes play and continue to move us in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance, lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets. We continue to speak, if only in whispers, to something inside us that longs to be named. We name it the past and drag it behind us, bag like a lung filled with shadow and song, dreams of running, the keys to lost names.

that reminds me, i read an incredibly incisive essay about how everyone on the political spectrum attempts to alienate third world women from feminism in attempt to stamp out the global threat of internationalism among women. it is a must-read.

Further, the refusal to engage with empirical reality leaves exploitable gaps in progressive politics. Loudly refusing to acknowledge the flaws of non-Western cultures makes forming alliances across national borders much harder, and incurs the risk of alienating, if not outright radicalizing third world women, who see the misogyny they chafe against being summarily dismissed by the same people who champion queer liberation or anti-imperialism or trans rights. This incoherence in Western leftism stems largely from unexamined antifeminist sentiments as well as a mangled understanding of anti-racism that paradoxically ends up abandoning the most vulnerable non-Western populations.

Personally, I find I am tired of cowardice. Of apprehension. And I am, more than anything, tired of “feminists” who lack the conviction to stand by their own beliefs when it gets the slightest bit inconvenient to do so. I am tired of asking my friends to lend me their skirts anytime I wish to assert a basic feminist principle, and I am first and foremost tired of cultural and moral relativism and rank cowardice masquerading as ‘progressive’, ‘decolonial’ thought.

We can be a society of polite ladies, if you like. We can be meek and spineless and too terrified to think for ourselves, too terrified to speak with our own two lips on the off-chance that a racist or imperialist or conservative non-Westerner twists our words and appropriates our statements for their own goals. We can continue to watch the slow death of feminism in front of our very eyes, as any centering of women’s rights or women’s plights or women’s pain is dismissed out of hand via any of a dozen academic, leftist-sounding rationales. Is that what you want?

Or do you want to be a fucking feminist?

Your tongue is still your own. So will you use it to stand with your sisters?

Which way, Western woman?

Text ID: Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies ... Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it.

Oscar yi Hou (Chinese-British, 1998) - Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, aka: Brooklyn Bleeding Hearts Club (2022)

—Hilary Mantel, in an interview with The Guardian

Hesitate to call, Louise Glück

Maya Deren, At Land (1944)

Pádraig Ó Tuama, on Rita Dove's poem "Eurydice, Turning" as featured in On Being: Poetry Unbound

Diane Sands

Patricia Highsmith, Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995

January by Jennifer Grotz