WEEKLY WRITING ROUND-UP: OCTOBER 20, 2017

Poetry

The Dress Code by Caitlin Doyle in The Yale Review: “I should have acted up when I was young. / Who’ll call the guidance counselor (she’s not there) / if I shave off my hair or pierce my tongue?”

biggest loser by Sophie Robinson on Lambda Literary: “fourth time: my drink / got spiked. fifth time: my drink / got spiked. sixth time: my drink / got spiked. seventh time: got / groped.”

two prose poems by Catherine Kyle in bad pony: “What I mean when I say Let’s go to the river is that I am urgent to devour sights of you gathering smoothened stones.”

After My College Votes Me a Member of the Culturally Elite by Lauren Yates in Crab Fat Magazine: “Wet earth after a dry spell requires its own word: petrichor. The way you hurt me goes by many names. Sometimes, breathing.”

poetry by John Gallaher in Tupelo Quarterly: “And this other part of the illustration, that there’s a heal to the loaf, / this doomsday slice we’ve imagined a clock for, sandwich after / sandwich, dire becoming more dire.”

No You Are Not Ashes by Azia Archer in Moonchild Magazine: “If you feel invisible / Until you learn to scream // I’m so sorry, little bird / I hear your song”

Essays

In Defence of De-persons by Johanna Hedva on GUTS: “I want to make a defence of “de-persons.” According to the American Psychiatric Association, I am one. That is, I have been diagnosed with depersonalization/derealization disorder (DP/DR for short), which means that I have “significant, persistent, or recurrent depersonalization (i.e., experiences of unreality or detachment from one’s mind, self, or body).” What that means is that, at various times, my body, self, environment, and the world itself do not feel real.”

Stephanie Kaylor in based in upstate New York and is currently a MA student in Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought at European Graduate School. She holds a MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University at Albany and is Managing Editor for Five:2:One Magazine and Reviews Editor for Glass: A Journal of Poetry.