Underwater
Your partner, Megan, greeted me at the airport with a warm hug. We communicated by phone the three weeks you were missing. When we saw each other, there was an instant knowing, a recognition of deep grief that we both carried.
Continue reading “Alison Dawson”
It’s that time of year: December Letters Project preparation time!
We invite you and/or your families, clubs, organizations, schools, and communities to be part of MITA’s annual December Letters Project. This is MITA’s annual local literacy project, but we encourage others to run a December Letters Project in their local communities. The project’s goal is very simple: to send connection, support, and solidarity –in the form of cards and letters– to our neighbors who are in psychiatric institutions during the winter solstice! We do this by making secular but festive cards and letters, with messages of love and encouragement, during the months of November and December, and delivering them to local psychiatric hospitals at the end of December, on or near the solstice. November is the month to prepare for the project, so we invite you to join us in being part of our December Letters Project or to hold a project in your community.
Continue reading “December Letters Project ~ 2023 Call for OWLS”
Boxing Fight
The opposing fighter was tall and long, at least for a 141 lb. I thought cutting the 15 pounds this past week would give me an advantage making me bigger than my opponent, but this guy was much bigger than I had anticipated. I took a deep breath in. My head felt light. Cutting that weight had taken its toll but there was no turning back. My opponent was in front of me, and I had no choice but to vanquish them.
Continue reading “Patricia Del Rosario”
A Queer Feminist Ethics of Eros
A Chapbook of Feminist Poems
The following works inspired this chapbook of poems: Transforming Carceral Logics: 10 reasons to Dismantle the Prison Industrial Complex Through Queer/Trans Analysis and Action by S. Lamble, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action by Audre Lorde, Are the Lips a Grave? by Lynne Huffer, Educating a Women: A Feminist Agenda by bell hooks, and Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (“Towards a New Consciousness“) by Gloria Anzaldúa.
Continue reading “Angelina Pacholczak”
A short story inspired by Gertrude Stein
Once there were two gray maidens, one a slate always on the verge of silver and one a gray of rosedust and blue with platinum potential that had become too cool; one fair and one less so, one plain and one more so. Both maids, caught in a gray scale. Ms. Peppy, the silver-lined one, never truly got peppy for any old berry or any old boy. Ms. Placid, the one less so and more so, never truly got peppy for any old anything, least of all a boy.
Continue reading “Julian of NorWitch”
Sleep of Waking
I tire of sleeping
And yet all around are the somnolent
The unconscious
The dreaming
The listless and stirring
Continue reading “Gwendolyn Harper”
Her gorgeous eyes stare at me
from a computer screen
as the headlines scream
Amy Winehouse, dead at 27 Continue reading “Giovanna Capone”
In 2017, while I was incarcerated against my will in a psychiatric institution in Buffalo, NY for ten days, I shared a room with a woman I will never forget.
She was Barbara to me at the time, although on one occasion, I asked her for her last name and I wrote it down in my composition notebook. Tonight, I looked through the pages of that notebook for her name. I have not been able to bear to look at what I had written during my time in hell with my friend until now. I found what I could handle reading for tonight. Three words:
Barbara Warren Jones. Continue reading “Justice for Barbara Warren-Jones”
Madwomen in the Attic 