You Can Bring Your Sheet Cake, But Do Show Up/ Erin Langley

Standing up for people so they won’t be murdered is not a radical agenda. We are not showing up to pay for the crimes of our ancestors. That would imply that the instinct to protect life arises from debt. We do owe a debt, but protecting human life is common decency. We need to show up because it is the right thing to do.

Rust & Remembrance: Jacob’s Ladder, Part 1

Marine diesel oil is the color of burnt sienna and emits an odor that smells like fermented soil, all earthy and rich, harsh but intoxicating. Work around tankers a while and you pick up a nose for it, like some insufferable wine buff. You become an aficionado of distillates.

Felony Record: Ban the Box

I’ve run the job search gauntlet before and having a record makes it even more difficult to change employers. Staying at my current job, no matter my happiness level, means not having to start over in proving my value and capability. Of the things holding me back, foremost is my fear of the box.

Bootstraps: Single Mother/ Courtney Gutierrez

I answer emails and nurse and write treatment goals and rock the baby and meet over the phone and jiggle a pacifier and enter data and bounce a vibrating chair with my feet and all the time I am buzzing, buzzing, buzzing inside.

Radical Romance: Two Poems/ Ani King

Roses on My Table, and Nothing in the Fridge   Time to eat, she says, and sheds the day, in the doorway, kicks off her practical shoes, and drapes herself over the table, narrow and tired, filled with hunger.   Oh, the table yearns for more than meager roses, sweet as they are, and I…

Read More

Two Comics/ Josh Poole

Josh Poole is a student at Dabney S. Lancaster Community College and a food services worker at Washington and Lee University. He grew up outside a small town named Brownsburg, which is no larger than Lago from High Plains Drifter, and just as isolated. His photo features a quarter ton stegosaurus he made out of stumps, and a small cat named Elvis.

Interview: Icess Fernandez Rojas

“My friends say I’m an activist but I don’t think I do enough things to be considered an activist. My storytelling is my resistance, it’s my defiance, it’s my self-care…”