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letter from the editors Dear Readers, The past year has demonstrated just how dangerous it is to be a woman in today’s society. As more and more women become victims of senseless violence, we must all speak up and speak out against the attitudes that fuel these hate crimes. This summer issue of The Riveter Review is meant to be in memoriam to the women who met untimely death due to the rampant misogyny that thrives in our society. We want to remember Maren Sanchez, a sixteen-year-old girl who was stabbed to death after she refused a boy’s offer to take her to prom. Though not much reported in the news, her death is one that should not have happened and could have been prevented if our culture were not so entrenched in male entitlement. Rest in peace, Maren Sanchez. We also want to pay our tribute to the victims of the UC Santa Barbara shooting earlier this year, a tragedy perpetrated by a shooter who, days before the attack, had recorded highly misogynistic manifesto. Only a month after Maren Sanchez’s murder, the Santa Barbara shooting again highlighted the issue of male entitlement to women’s bodies. These two incidents are by no means the entirety of recent crimes against women. Every day, women across the world face abuse, most of which goes unreported in the news. We dedicate this issue to all these women, known or unknown, who have suffered needlessly on the account of their gender and whose struggles have often been proliferated by poor coverage in the media. We must ensure that these murders are not ignored and forgotten. We’ve created this issue focusing specifically on the danger women constantly face simply for being female. We hope these pieces move you and motivate you to crusade for the physical safety and peace of mind that is the natural right of all people everywhere. With love, Elizabeth, Katie, and Sariel
ON THE COVER: She Wear Them Well Aoife O’Dwyer
about the editors Sariel Hana Friedman, born and raised in Los Angeles, CA, is currently a first-year at Barnard College of Columbia University -- the feminist captial of the universe. She is a is editor-in-chief of the award-winning Dark as Day Literary Arts Journal and published a book of poems entitled This is Why. Sariel has been a feminist ever since she was a little girl, when her mom fed her feminist theory in the backseat of the car. In high school, Sariel was the token feminist and even co-founded her school’s Gender Equality Club. She was recently featured on a Nick News segment with Gloria Steinem entitled “The Future of Feminism.” In her spare time, Sariel enjoys making art, watching films, listening to music and writing. Sariel believes that her chromosomes should not stop her from conquering the world…. even when the rest of the world might not agree. When she grows up, Sariel hopes to become the next Joan Didion.
Katie Paulson, originally from Madison, WI, is currently a freshman at Swarthmore College, where she hopes to pursue English and political science. During the summer of 2013, she attended the Kenyon Review Young Writers’ Workshop, where she met co-editors Sariel Friedman and Elizabeth Engel. Katie spent this last summer writing a strange novella that crosses magical realism and existentialism, moving through her endless book list, honing her understanding of the grammar of Quenya, and, of course, organizing the third issue of the Riveter Review. At the moment, her favorite writers include Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, and Harper Lee, all of whom have crafted beautifully complex and intriguing and captivating female characters in their novels. Katie dreams of someday emulating these novelists and through writing reveal that women do not belong in the background of literature or, for that matter, the background of anything else.
Elizabeth Engel, currently a student at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, USA, got an amazing birthday gift this year when Taylor Swift publicly announced that she identified as a feminist. Besides Taylor Swift, other things she loves include creative writing, followed closely by Richard Siken, great media representation, making people smile, David Levithan, her dog (an eleven year old bearded collie), and reading articles about YA literature and intersectionality. She has been writing prose from a young age, and has participated in three summer workshops since her freshman year of high school: Sarah Lawrence Writers Village (2011), University of Virginia’s Young Writers Workshop (2012-4), and the Kenyon Review Young Writers’ Workshop (2013). She has a bad habit of scheduling her life around concerts, and has a bookmark folder dedicated to cool things that happen in outer space. If you think Phyllis Schlafly is a good person you should probably never talk to her, but otherwise she loves meeting new people and would especially love if you wanted to recommend music to her.
table of contents The Robin Lindsey Bellosa For Her Information Aoife O’Dwyer An Extended Occupancy Aoife O’Dwyer Emily with Angus Lauren Crow Baby Caitlin McGowan Dear Tamsin Brittney Pellon Childhood Tara Violet Niami Ana Carol Rossetti
Kid Fears Brittney Pellon
Ophelia Nettie Faris
Her Equilibrium Anca Mihaela Bruma
Touch Tara Violet Niami
Rodent Palace Barbara Harroun
Redress Darlyn Lojero
Lolita Tara Violet Niami
untitled self-portrait Clare Aimee
Private Tea Party Georgia Grace Gibson
Temple Rayna Momen
Confused Housewife Pottery Club Georgia Grace Gibson
Do It Wrong Kate McDonough
The Confused Housewife Tea Party Georgia Grace Gibson
Alice Carol Rossetti
Limitation as Transgression: The Subversive Politics in “The Exorcist” Shinjini Bhattacharjee
Helena Carol Rossetti
untitled self-portrait Clare Aimee
Kid Fears Brittney Pellon
Sitting Down to Eat Nettie Faris
Walking Back M. Kani Darling Lolita Tara Violet Niami Mein Kamf Tammy Robacker Woman’s Realm Brittany Pellon
w e w a n t y o u r w o r k email us at theriveterreview@gmail.com
the robin Lindsey Bellosa
Always female, the robin: orange breast seeming matronly, hopping; benign. suddenly attacks :flashing bill shearing the dirt; legs braced— again, again: a drill— weak dangle of pink; one tug, white-eyed, up from the ground and into the gulping beak. She wants worms for her babies. I say to my boys, as if to justify her fierceness, then realize my words teach them: excusing, thereby condemning, the robin. If women are fierce, they are protecting something or better, someone. As though this robin thinks only of her nest, as though women think only of their children— We do not. All creatures of hunger— our wildness is caged with rules. As much a warrior as any other hunter, the robin hops, tilts us a blank stare. No martyr, no helpless or sweet ingénue, the orange-red breast gleams like armor.
“For Her Information” by Aoife O’Dwyer
For Her Information Aoife O’Dwyer
An Extended Occupancy Aoife O’Dwyer
Emily with Angus
Lauren Crow
baby Caitlin McGowan
Not too close, baby. Watch your fingers, baby. Comb your hair. Nice and gentle, baby. A kiss for daddy, baby? Don’t get dirt on your knees. Pretty, dainty, baby. Sprung up like a flower, baby. My, you’ve grown so fast! It means he likes you, baby. We’ll get it fixed, baby. You’re still my princess. Remember to be cautious, baby. Not in that skirt, baby. Do you want them to stare? Don’t tease me, baby. I’ll be gentle, baby. Trust me, it’s fine. You know you like it, baby. I can’t help myself, baby, When you’re dressed the way you are. Nice tits, baby. How about a smile, baby? Pretty please? You’re so beautiful, baby. Like my own fragile rose, baby. I will protect you always. I’ll take care of it, baby. Don’t worry about it, baby. That’s men’s work. I was thinking at least three, baby. Take another aspirin, baby. Who’s my favorite lady? I don’t know, baby. I mean, it’s a nice “thought,” baby. I think they would miss you too much. I would miss you too much. After all, you are my baby. Sweet baby. Kind baby. Pretty baby. Little, innocent, baby. And it’s dangerous out there, baby. Careful, baby. Mind yourself. This world was not made for girls.
dear tamsin Brittany Pellon
Tamsin, do not look at yourself like an apology. Do not trade your imperfect body for glass. Do not trade it for steel. Keep your flesh abundant let it keep you bound to all things painfully real. When people rush into you at ferocious velocities pulling hair, splintering your frame, speak softly it is not their fault and you will recover. When you gnaw at your own wrists with such determined philosophy to cease and to wither, speak softly it is not your fault and you will recover. Keep your fingernails clean and the whiskey cheap. Tamsin please, do not slave for someone else’s word or hand. Do not bargain while you sleep. Tamsin, do not look at yourself like an apology.
Childhood Tara Violet Niami
Ana Carol Rossetti
Alice Carol Rossetti
Helena Carol Rossetti
Kid Fears Brittney Pellon
m u i r b i l i u her eq Anca Mihaela Bruma
Her equilibrium is faltered by the parallels between her thoughts... The verses rise above the Absolute, leading to a labyrinth. You started counting backwards mystified by Her maze, a mundane repetition of your own Dimension!... And the scarlet Passion still holds Her crown!
rodent palace Barbara Harroun The night we moved our pathetic shit in, fat raindrops fell and landed like dimes. I squealed and ran, clumsy and happy. Somehow Bex had scored a huge bottle of Galileo wine and we got two of our four coffee mugs out, sat on the floor and toasted our new shack. The storm crawled in as we arranged our hideous couch and duct taped recliner. We sat in the living room with the lights out and the clouds, one shade darker than the bruised sky, moved like something alive. Bex said, “We should definitely get a cat.” We heard the wind sliding through the places where the walls did not meet. Somewhere nearby we heard the steady dripping of a leak we ignored. “Yeah,” I sighed, “you know this place is a rodent palace.” We were so poor, but we were so happy we couldn’t think of a thing to say. And with Bex, that was totally all right, being quiet. Together. The next day we woke up early. None of the windows had curtains, and we’d slept in the living room on cheap swimming pool rafts we’d bought at K-Mart. The room was filled with palatial sunlight. “It’s fucking glorious, isn’t it?” Bex whispered like she wasn’t sure I was awake. It was glorious. “It feels different, right?” I said, “I mean, I’ve woken up for like nineteen years, but this sunlight feels different.” Three of the windows were painted shut, but two opened. The breeze was pathetic, and my legs stuck to the plastic of the deflated raft. Bex stretched and it was luxurious, like she was alone and no one was watching. Her hand rested near mine. I reached out and took it. Squeezed. She looked at me and smiled. One eye still had sleep in it. “I don’t have a God damned cent to my name, but I’ve never felt richer.” I wanted to say something profound and sacred about freedom. Being free. From her shit heel dad and my house overrun with kids, and my mom’s new asshole boyfriend and that new baby, who was technically my sister, but instead I smiled and then we both busted up laughing. Breakfast was dry corn flakes because we didn’t have any milk, but they were good. I thought maybe, that afternoon at work, I could lift a couple cartons of milk and we’d eat like civilized adults the next morning. Bex worked part-time as a nanny. The mom didn’t work and the dad was a doctor, and on the first day, she got lost because the house was so big. She loved the kids though and the kids loved her. Some people have a way, they’re like what moms are supposed to be and it’s effortless. Not my mom. I loved her, but she’s not maternal even though she got knocked up every time she had sex. I will never have kids. I’ve done my share of tending.
I liked my job as a dietary aid at the hospital. No one touched me or cried or slobbered on me or threw up. I had to wear all white. If there were leftovers after line we got to eat them. If Joan was working, she let me bring some home for Bex, even though it was against the rules. Joan said she remembered what it was like. Then she sighed and said, “Sometimes I still know, girl. I hope when you’re my age you’re sitting pretty. On the lap of some rich doctor.” Rent was $450 a month. We had to scrape wallpaper and paint in two rooms as part of the deal. We could manage water and electricity because we didn’t have air. We also didn’t have a phone, but we didn’t need one. Who would we have called? Our shitty parents? We had a CD player and the wine and we listened to the Beatles while we worked. By the third mug of wine, we were singing too, giddy on the fumes of the wallpaper dissolvent. Bex wore a bandanna and her cheeks were pink. She was belting “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and then we were dancing together. And just like that I felt like I couldn’t breathe because the sadness was so big, bigger than my ribcage and my throat. Because I’d never been that happy, not until that moment, and it seemed wrong. So unfair and impoverished. That night we heard the mice for real. In the walls and skittering over the cheap kitchen linoleum. All night. The next morning we pooled our change. At Dollar General all we could afford was the glue traps. It was humiliating when we paid for them. The woman behind us in line blew air out of her mouth like a deflating balloon. I wanted to become small, a mouse skulking off. But Bex gave her a “fuck off” stare and counted more laboriously and I was so proud that she was my friend and now my roommate, and I counted pennies with her, really loud until we lost it, until we were bent over at the waist, gulping for air. The checker just scooped the change into her open palm and muttered, “Do you want a bag?” That night we heard the traps work. The mice cried out, but it was futile. They were trapped. Their feet mired in the glue. Bex whispered in the terrible dark, “Shit, Jeannie. They’re gonna starve. That’s how it works. They’re stuck there and they’ll stay until they starve to death.” I heard her gasping and I knew she was crying. I’ve known her since second grade. I would have killed her dad if she asked me to. I rose up. I looked at what she couldn’t. I carried them outside one by one, placed them carefully in the garbage can so they could see each other and not feel so alone in their dying. All so she could sleep.
Lolita Tara Violet Niami
Private Tea Party Georgia Grace Gibson
Decorated in ‘feminine’ flowers and guided with faux gold, this piece is intended to replicate vintage china tea sets owned by posh housewives while also touching again upon the idea of oppressed sexuality within middle aged women (and the thoughts of what they would really like to be doing instead of eating scones off vintage china plates, stuck with the wrong person or the wrong gender) with the ceramic symbol in the centre of the plate.
Confused Housewife Pottery Club Georgia Grace Gibson
Final piece from a project on sexuality, this piece focuses on the same idea from private tea party, with a sexually suppressed housewife creating her own kitchen ware, only to end up creating ‘obscene’ imagery upon the ceramics (ft. penis shaped spout, vulva handle, edges shaped like lips, and small gold vulvas decorating the lid).
The Confused Housewife Tea Party Georgia Grace Gibson
Part of a series of studies into husbands/boyfriends/etc. of a range of sexualities, religions, and body type who enjoy dressing in stereotypically women’s clothing in secret and how this affects their views of themselves as men and the male sexuality.
limitation as transgression: the subversive politics in the exorcist Shinjini Bhattacharjee Truth is a matter of the imagination. -Ursula Le Guin One need not be a chamber to be haunted... Ourself behind ourself concealed Should startle most. -Emily Dickinson William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist, first published in 1971 and later given a cinematic interpretation in 1973 by William Friedrich, became a massive cultural phenomenon as it propelled the horror genre within the ambit of the mainstream discourse by using its stereotypical tropes to bring to surface the deep psychic anxieties arising from the various socio-political discourses in the-then society1 in a terrifying and violent form. The discourse of childhood has been an integral part in the horror genre as it, by presenting child as the subversive Other who disrupts the normative society with its disruptive chaos belies the stereotypical idea of children as epitome of innocence and ideological neutralization. As Dani Cavallaro in The Gothic Vision: Three centuries of Horror, Terror And Fear puts it, children on the one hand are “associated with innocence, simplicity and the lack of worldly experience…unsullied by the murky deviousness of socialized existence. On the other hand, precisely because children are not yet fully encultured, they are frequently perceived as threat to the fabric of adult society” (135). This paranoia about child sexuality became even more prominent in the 1960s, mainly due to the breakdown of family structures and various sexual liberation movements which posed a threat to heteronormative construction of family. It was also around this time that Phillippe Aries published his groundbreaking book, Centuries of Childhood (1960), which put forth the idea that the concept of childhood is not a natural given, but a social construction which emerged only during the Renaissance and gained prominence in the nineteenth century, and which advocated the theory of innocence which emphasized the protection of children against adult reality, including the entire gamut of birth, death, and sex. The character of Regan MacNeil dissolutes these quasi-mythical and symbolic boundaries which construct and confine the definitions of childhood by exhibiting an infinite malleability, something which gets augmented by her position on the verge of adolescence. Occupying a luminal space between childhood and nascent womanhood, she not only defies the dominant patriarchal code that defines a child’s normative growth in the form of a progression from sublimated infantile desires to an incipient adulthood, but also displays an unchildlike rage, deviant sexuality, and employs a language considered tabooed by the society. The horror this subversive figure evokes finds a metaphorical representation in her repulsive body covered in blood, urine, excrement, and bile. The opening chapter of the main narrative marks Regan’s latent sexual transgression by presenting her relationship with her mother, Chris, in almost sexualized terms through the acts of holding, kissing and caressing. “Beaming, Chris caught [Regan] in a bearhug, squeezing, then kissed the girl’s cheek with smacking ardor. She could not repress the full flood of her love. ‘Mmum-mmum-mmum!’ More kisses” (25). But though Chris initially participates in this semierotic relationship with her daughter, she, despite being a New Woman, is not fully able to transgress the normative sexual boundaries because she is also limited by the ideologies of the age in which she had been brought up, and the friction between these two does not give her the complete ideological liberty to subvert the dominant order, which finds manifestation in her increasing discomfort with her daughter’s “abnormal energy” (57), which finally forces her to take help from the patriarchal authorities. The first notable ‘supernatural’ occurrence takes place in the very beginning of the novel when Chris at the middle of the night hears “odd”, “muffled” and “profound” (12) rapping sounds, coming from the attic which, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar famously note3, acts an alternative space away from the main domain of the home which allows females to perform their repressive sexualities. Later in the novel, Chris is confronted with another ‘unnatural’ occurrence—the violent shaking of Regan’s bed, which took place several times and which, as Blatty puts it, “was always followed by Regan’s insistence that she sleep with her mother” (57; emphasis mine). Through this latent incestuous desire for her mother, Regan not only deconstructs the normative structure of the family defined by fixed relationships between its members and, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet points out, a rigidly demarcated and mutually domains of desire but also introduces to Chris an alternative discourse which promotes multitudinous possibilities of such relationships.
While the first part of the novel focuses on Regan’s incipient subversive sexuality, the subsequent ones describe in a vivid manner the gradual estrangement of Regan from the hegemonic discourse through a rampant performance of tabooed erotic desires which not only denounce the parental authority but also challenge the patriarchal regimes of normative laws and religion. The first act of stark defiance of the hegemonic discourse occurs when during a party thrown by Chris, Regan is found standing, “urinating gushingly onto the rug” (83), thereby transgressing boundaries which define the gender order of the society. This projection of an absent penis in all its base performativity also offers a horrific parody of the ‘exalted’ function of the penis in gender construction. As Bakhtin puts it in Rabelias and His World, the discourse of the grotesque involves the “lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract to the material level” (19). Regan not only transcends the physical boundaries dividing genders but also linguistic ones. Robin Lakoff in her landmark text Language and Women’s Place puts forth the idea that gender determines language the language by arguing the manner in which heterosexual, white middle class women use only specific features of a language because they are denied means of strong expression including coarse language or expletives in the patriarchal society. In The Exorcist only the male figures employ sexual abusive language, which women like Chris confine within the realm of thought. Regan , however uses the very realm of demonic possession which legitimizes her symptoms by using it to hurl sexual abuses at the patriarchal figures. She further adopts polyphonic voices in the novel, the plurality of which allows her to dwell in the freedom of hybridity. However, this linguistic transgression reaches it pinnacle with her use of backward English during her interview with the psychiatrist and Father Damien Karras. Cora Kaplan in Language and Gender argues that “language is the most important thing of all forms of human communication. Through the acquisition of language, we become human and social beings…social entry into patriarchal culture is made through language” (56). Thus, by employing inverse language, Regan refuses to participate in the normative discourses which construct both sex and gender ideologies. Apart from transgressing gender boundaries, the ‘possession’ also allows Regan to perform divergent sexualities which enables her to deconstruct the normative ideology which constructs specific sexualities in order to uphold and maintain its hegemonic superiority. Thus, while the doctors try to comprehend Regan’s condition as she flings herself up and down on bed, the latter pulls up her nightgown and screams, “‘Fuck me! Fuck me!’...and with both her hands began masturbating frantically” (123), thereby indulging in a sterile erotic pleasure which not only defied the dominant conservative discourse of the day which advocated sex as a means of procreation, but also exposed the limits of a heterosexual act of sex. As Luce Irigaray discusses in This Sex Which is Not One, the female body comprising of both lack and excess allows multiple sites for sexual pleasure, and therefore enables women to redefine themselves. This self-touching, as Irigarey puts it, “gives women a form that is in(de)finitely transformed” (qtd. in Jones, 233). She further subverts the normative discourse by exhibiting a monstrous heterosexuality when she squeezes the psychiatrist’s scrotum “with a hand which gripped him like an iron talon” (142), a ‘perverse’ eroticism deriving pleasure by inflicting pain on the partner, thereby questioning the very idea of heterosexuality as ’normal’ and ‘natural’. Regan also performs homosexuality in the novel in a scene where she is “gliding spiderlike, rapidly, close behind Sharon…her tongue flicking quickly in and out of her mouth while she hisse[s] sibilantly like a serpent…[Sharon] screamed as she felt Regan’s tongue snaking out at her ankle” (135). Reminiscent of King Lear’s Regan, who too is described as a serpent and therefore as a symbol of base sensuality, the figure of Regan MacNeil defies the patriarchal authority which had tried to control her by using the phallus like syringe by sexually liberating herself by experiencing a lesbian jouissance. But perhaps her most radical sexual transgression takes place when she stabs herself in the vagina with a crucifix yelling, ”Yes, you’re going to let Jesus fuck you, fuck you,” and when Chris tries to stop her, Regan “reache[s] out a hand, clutching Chris’s hair, and yank[s] her head down, pressing her face hard against her vagina, smearing it with blood while she frantically undulate[s] her pelvis…Lick me, lick me, lick me! Aahhhh!” (215). By engaging in a sexual act with her mother, Regan not uses her identity as a possessed girl to act out her incestuous desires which she could not fully exhibit in the beginning of the novel but also simultaneously brings forth the idea that the relationship between family members is not ‘natural’, but are cultural constructs intended to control and regulate sexual activities. In fact, as Marshall Sahlins in the Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology argues, “human conceptions of kinship may be so far from biology so as to exclude all but a small fraction of a person’s genealogical connections from the category of ‘close kin’, while at the same time, including in that category, as sharing common blood, very distinctly related people or even complete strangers” (75).
untitled self-portrait Clare Aimee
sitting down to eat
Nettie Farris
ophelia
He fed her lies, so he could live with it. She ate the lies, so she could live with it.
Nettie Farris
Horizontal or Vertical. That is the question.
Touch Tara Violet Niami
redress Darlyn Lojero
I, a brown archipelago: sinews and skin scattered and spliced on your blue mattress. You, brusque appropriating hands: mapping conquests bluish black and greenish purple on my scattered and spliced sinews and skin. the night, you rocked me in your arms. tonight, you stretch rip gnaw maul trespass my straddled soul. Satiated: you turn to your side. I, a bluish black and greenish purple archipelago: reeking of your excess. I stand up to undress and redress.
untitled self-portraitClare Aimee
temple Rayna Momen
It would not harm another soul. It would disarm, usurp control, and honor itself, your honor, it is time to give back what you stole. Unprotected sex is a woman in America. Unprotected sex is a woman in the world. My body is my temple, and it will always be. It is not some place where you go to pray. It is not your place to decide how and whether it should be shaped and changed. It is not ‘open for business’ for you to come inside and go as you please. It is not for you to discern how much protection it deserves, and regardless of how many terms you serve it will shed and it will bleed, so let it bend, let it breathe, just let it be. Since my body, my temple, became a piece of legislation it has protested every attempt to enslave it, and it will stop at nothing to stop the violence. It calls a ceasefire, a plea for peace. It calls for help and for relief, reprieve. It will not be silenced. If my body held a protest sign, it would chastise those who exploit and stigmatize a woman’s insides, a woman’s insight, a woman’s inherent right to give birth to new life, or to terminate when she feels it is right for her, not for you, not for me. It would not compromise to ease the tension or give false power to your religion, blasphemy. It would not suffer by choice in the name of freedom, in the name of God or some illusive American dream.
My body is my temple, but under your laws it seems doomed. Women forced to risk their lives to abort however viable, rape or not, the choice should be mine, not yours. Nine months of my life, the rising cost of raising children, the fringe benefits of fostering the system, the abuse of silent witnesses, the battered by belligerence, the inability to adequately care, the substances that impair, those born infected, affected, lacking access to prenatal care, so they just consume. If my body had the right to speak, it would scream, “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?” to fondle the folds of my flesh with your articles, to penetrate my rights with the stroke of your pen, to procreate or terminate, to bring to term or masturbate, to bleed and shed, and do it all over again. My body is my temple, and when it’s laid to rest, it will not be buried under laws that kept me from what I felt was best. It will not be from some unsanitary procedure in some dark alley in black of night. It will not be from complications because you made it shameful to ask for help in broad daylight. Your grotesque images plastered to picket signs, forced into too-small hands to make a point, doesn’t make it right. The point is this, my body is my temple for me to love, to behold, in which to delight.
Kate McDonough Do It Wrong
M.Kani
walking back
The first time she left by herself, it was in the short beige dress she’d worn to the party, paired with kitten heels that were hard to walk in but they’d totally complimented her legs. The area was new and so was she, and it was nothing but a shame that her dorm was so far away from her friends’. She walked slowly across the sidewalk, reveling in the feeling of the warm night breeze across her skin. It was serene and the silence was supremely peaceful, almost better than the party had been. It took well over ten minutes for her to notice that she was being followed, and by that point her heart was pounding in tune with every click her heels made against the pavement. The calmness was replaced by a kind of hypersensitivity that she couldn’t control and to her, making it to her room safely was a miracle. The second time she left, almost two months later, her heels were stashed in her purse as she waved her friends goodbye, and her running shoes made no sound against the ground. But there was a car following a few meters behind her, and it was too dark for her to see the driver. Several times she paused and turned around methodically, looking directly into the front window of the car, making it clear that she knew he was there. The car would stop, and then continue when she turned around. His stare felt like it was inching its way into her nerves. She ran the rest of the way back.
Her roommate was still up by the time she collapsed onto her bed. “Yeah, you’re walking near the downtown area, so there’re probably some men who are driving back along that route. Bunch of creeps.” “It’s kind of scary.” “Didn’t anyone ever tell you to be cautious? Here, I have some ideas...” Next weekend was her friend’s twenty-first birthday and some people were wondering why she brought a worn old coat with her but the other girls stared sympathetically and offered to walk her back. “No, it’s fine. I’m leaving early because I have class in the morning, so I wouldn’t want to ruin your fun...” The coat came down to her calves and hid every inch of the dress she’d borrowed, and the addition of her sneakers made her look like an old homeless man from afar, which was perfect. But on the way back on the sidewalk was a group of three older guys who she vaguely recognized from the university library. They were probably late additions to the party, hoping to sneak in by knowing one or two guys there. She wanted to run back and tell her friend not to let them in but they were students too, and it would probably cause a lot of drama. They looked over her coat and sneakers and bare ankles. “Man, if that’s a trend these days, I’m out,” one of them joked. “Bring back the tiny shorts and slutty dresses.” Said at that moment, it made her clench her teeth. She left her next after-party in her shortest dress, not pulling it down over her knees or drawing it up close to her neck, with her longest keys held out in the spaces between her fingers.
Darling Lolita Tara Violet Niami
Daring Lolita Tara Violet Niami
mein kampf Tammy Robacker
You’ve set up camp deep in the Black Forest, buried behind my mind. I locked the door yet I still hear something clandestine, nocturnal stirrings, and sense you hanging back. You watch me like a fiend from the dark apartment where you’ve parked a permanent parlor chair and finger stag magazines beneath a look that stares me down and calls to me to climb back through decades, into your lap. I have tried to ignore you. I know you have seen me act out. I have kamikazied to fuck all the others over the years to find a face to replace you. You give me no privacy, no peace, even when I confess. You rise up, Opa, like an erection in church. Always this ungodly interruption thrusting up into the heavens. Even when I am good, you cast me back to 1977.
Woman’s Realm Brittany Pellon
contributor bios Clare Aimée is an artist and self-portratist from Saskatchewan, currently based on the west coast of Canada. She studies at the University of Victoria where she is working towards a degree in Visual Arts with a major in photography. She is interested in issues surrounding ownership, identity, sexuality, the female body, and how these subjects can be contrasted and combined together. You can see more of her work at www.flickr.com/photos/clare-aimee. Lindsey Bellosa lives in Syracuse, NY. She has an MA in Writing from the National University of Ireland, Galway and has poems published in both Irish and American journals: most recently The Comstock Review, IthacaLit, The Lake and Nine Mile Press. She has won awards for poetry in the Red Poppy Review summer poetry competition and the CNY Pen Women competition. Her first chapbook, The Hunger, was published with Willet Press in 2014. She considers feminism to be synonymous with human rights and hopes her writing furthers its efforts at education. Shinjini Bhattacharjee is a poet and the Editor-in-Chief of Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal. She considers herself to be a lexical photographer who loves to rummage through language to find words that smell like infinite spandex, and weave them into images to cloak her experiences and emotions. Her feminist inspirations are Sophocles, Aphra Behn, Fanny Burney, and Helene Cixous, who made her understand how women can used their very marginality to question and subvert patriarchy. that Her poems have been published, or are forthcoming in The Stray Branch, Metazen, Literary Orphans, Four and Twenty Poetry, Dead Flowers: A Poetry Rag, Luna Luna Mag,and elsewhere. She is also the author of Masquerading Fawn, a poetry chapbook. My name is Anca Mihaela Bruma, I am Romanian living in Dubai/UAE. My love for poetry started when I was just 9 years old, when I registered myself to some creative poetry writing group. It was a turning point for me as I started to discover the mysteries of the written word and its impact on the readers. Since early age, I have always viewed writing poetry as the perfect medium which is able to depict profound unfathomable complexities of someone’s life or life itself, to render into words that which is unsayable, that ineffable, which can be truly deeper than the language itself. Through my writings, as well years of readings, I always looked to seek something beyond that which was apparent to others! I was fascinated to see how different aspects of truth were transfigured by different emotions, how experiences were poetized. I pursued seeing beauty expressed in all forms of art, not just poetry; creating a “thirst” within me to explore more and more for the knowledge of the mystery beneath and beyond it, as a symbol of something greater and higher with its own power to immortalize the expressions over the years Lauren Crow: Media seldom represents bodies that tend to diverge from classic archetypes of beauty, fitness, and health. As a photographer, it is my belief that bodies perceived to come inconflict with these normative physiques are the ones worth really seeing. I seek to reconstruct what it means to have an imperfect body, and to question the use of the word “imperfection” as used to devalue and marginalize the bodies of real people. I am captivated by these bodies, the bodies of everyday people, and seek to investigate the beauty of their natural form. As a woman, I recognize my own body as divergent from standardized and publicized forms of beauty, and hope others, through my photography, can relinquish their some of their own body dysphoria and can understand the beauty a body holds in its own right.
Nettie Farris was raised by a single mother (born the same year as Marilyn Monroe) who was criticized for working to support her five children. A feminist from birth, she gravitated to feminist theory in graduate school. Her own writing has largely been influenced by women: Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Joyce Carol Oates, and Lydia Davis, among others. She has published reference articles on Dorothy Dinnerstein, Elaine Showalter, bell hooks, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Georgia Grace Gibson is an 18 year old artist from North East England, currently attending a foundation course in art and design at Sunderland University’s National Glass Centre Campus after finishing her A Level Fine Art. Having worked in a variety of mediums in the past (particularly photography), Georgia is currently focusing on ceramics, sculpture (both mixed media and textiles) and performance art in the near future. Georgia only became interested in art as a career when she began developing work based on her strong passion for feminism, which motivates her interest in stereotypical feminine work like pottery, while largely looking at the concepts of sexuality throughout genders, and how that is represented within orientation, aesthetics and occurrences such as marriage. Her feminist artwork is largely inspired by her strong female upbringing, the queer community she is part of, feminist friends and also artists such as Sarah Lucas, Hannah Wilke and Jessica Stoller. Georgia has had two exhibitions so far (one solo and one group), been selected by Royal Academy of Arts for their A Level Summer Online Exhibition, been featured in online zines/magazines and currently works forThe Pulp Zine and Cherry Mag, while running a her self-made female identified arts group, Clandestine Collective, based within the North East of England. Barbara Harroun is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University where she teaches creative writing and composition. Her work has previously appeared in the Sycamore Review, issues of Another Chicago Magazine, Buffalo Carp, Friends Journal, Inquire, and Bird’s Thumb. It is forthcoming in i70 Review, Sugared Water, Requited Journal and the anthology Prairie Gold. She lives in Macomb, IL with the intense creative endeavors and amazing human beings, Annaleigh, Jack, and her awesome partner, Bill. M.Kani is an engineering student at the University of Waterloo. She started calling herself a feminist at the age of fifteen, but would have become one earlier if a teacher had not wrongly described the movement as an example of political extremism during class, which discouraged her younger self. She enjoys playing piano and competitive chess, and is passionate about science communication and introducing young girls into pursuing their education in STEM fields, because she is somewhat annoyed by the scarcity of other female students in her major. She also loves writing, and has published two anthology pieces and various parody-style fanfictions, along with many short-prose pieces for her blog. Her favourite books include “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K Dick and “Gödel Escher Bach” by Douglas Hofstadter. My name is Kate McDonough and I am an illustrator. Right now for me, being a feminist means learning to love and accept myself as a woman and a person. I have struggled with social anxiety and self-esteem throughout my life. In the past couple of years I have finally started to look at myself objectively instead of comparing myself to magazines and the women around me. I’ve been creating comics to express the thoughts I’ve had as I try to cope with anxiety. Humor has been a way for me to connect with other people and other women. Caitlin McGowan lives in Mamaroneck and is 15 years old. She is a feminist because she believe in the radical notion that women are indeed people and deserve to be treated as people.
Rayna Momen is an androgynous, feminist poet, sociologist and activist currently residing in Morgantown, WV, where she was born and raised. She advocates for minorities and other marginalized groups by actively taking a stand against the injustices she sees, and uses poetry as a means of challenging dominant ideologies. Her poems have appeared in Skin to Skin: The Art of the Lesbian, Issue 01. She is a member of Morgantown Poets and the Morgantown Writers Group. Aoife O’Dwyer is an Irish artist with persistent inclinations towards photography, digital media, design and installation. At the core of her creative practice is an obsession with perception. Selfperception, sensory perception, identity and experience all play a vital role in what motivates her artistically. Body autonomy and body image are also key areas of exploration in her work as well as questioning the way the female body and image is both portrayed and consumed – particularly in digital and virtual settings. Aoife is a member of the Bunny Collective which has impacted her feminist awareness in many ways and continues to be a place of daily inspiration, solidarity, education and encouragement. She is also the founder of ‘A Secret’ Magazine which is a photography magazine that combines photographs with anonymously submitted ‘secrets’ and tellings in order to recontextualise the imagery and offer an alternative point of interpretation for the viewer. Tammy Robacker served as Poet Laureate of Tacoma, WA in 2010-11, and she is a 2011 Hedgebrook Writer in Residence award winner. In 2009, Ms. Robacker published her first collection of poetry, The Vicissitudes. Tammy’s poetry has appeared in WomenArts, Comstock Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Columbia Magazine, Floating Bridge Review: Pontoon, and the Allegheny Review. Her poetry manuscript, We Ate Our Mothers, Girls, was selected as a finalist in the 2009 Floating Bridge Press chapbook contest. Currently enrolled in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Pacific Lutheran University, Tammy is working on a second poetry collection. Visit the poet: www. tammyrobacker.com or www.pearlepubs.com Carol Rossetti is a 26-year-old illustrator and graphic designer from Brazil. She despises the world’s attempts to control women’s body, behavior and identity; so she’s started a series of illustrations in a friendly tone hoping to reach people about how absurd this really is. She’s also a frenetic reader, cinema enthusiast, chocolate lover and constantly in love with Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer.