To Our Dearly Departed: Intimacy and Grief

As a poet, writing a poem is one of my ways of being in the world, and certainly one of my most effective ways of dealing with complicated emotions. My brother died of metastatic colorectal cancer in early June 2019. Since his death, I have charted time in terms of his death: there is before…

Chinatown Poem

  —   “Chinatown Poem” is an original cento written using language taken from billboards, commercial shop signs, advertisements, and other elements of the linguistic landscape of Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood. The poem explores Chinatown as both a site of diasporic cultural production and a space where racist tropes and stereotypes about Asian people circulate and…

En Route

We are always en route.  No matter our destination, there is always the next stop, the shuffle of feet on and off the train, variably encased in autumnal suedes, daggered high-heels, beachy sandals, or light-up sneaks for the young and unruly. Leaving behind stubborn mud, fresh-scented grass stems, mulish sand, and crinkled bubble-gum wrappers—evidence of…

Prosody

Nitya Rajeshuni // “I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.”1 — Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need…

His Wife (No. 8847)

Jonathan Chou // His Wife (No. 8847) History from wife. The water came in through painted rain pipes. It was not paint but a daub of lard on his wife’s dress. She didn’t remove it after all.1 Things didn’t go smoothly. Furniture had to be wiped off. Elix. Iron Phos. Quin. & Strych. Smash the…

Coffee with a Colleague

Poet, Activist, and Educator Kwoya Fagin Maples, MFA Sarah Berry // This interview series features educators, scholars, artists, and healthcare providers whose work is vital to the growth of the health humanities. On Friday, March 12, I interviewed Ms. Kwoya Fagin Maples, MFA, about her poetry collection Mend (University Press of Kentucky, 2018), her intersectional…

Hope on Trial

Sarah Roth // My parents shared a broad, brown desk in their home office. In the years of my mother’s struggle with ovarian cancer, a foot of papers, envelopes, and printouts were stacked on the desk, documenting clinical trials for which she might be eligible. For a time, the desk, with its thick layer of…