The furniture was gone. And only the promise of empty space stared back at me. It was the promise of empty space that had beckoned me to Utah six and a half years earlier. The naked sky offered me the possibility to do anything and be anyone, and the silent mountain sentinels assented to shield [...]
A poem by Helen Heightsman Gordon.
To be docile, demure and alluring. There’s often focus on the soft aspects of women, but why not celebrate the aggressive side of female sexuality? I’ve started this series using collage elements from clothing catalogs. I looked for the least threatening part of the model’s anatomy. Arms resting on a beach towel, arms [...]
Given all this, what then is the utility of an anniversary? Why are anniversaries still important, even after their rampant commercialization, indiscriminate application, and often specious interpretation?
1.
I eat mud
when sun doesn’t shine
and
eyes, mine like seas, busk
heavy with the sadness of every season at winter.
To cheer me up
they use illumination therapy and melatonin, carefully ionized air,
but I tell them nothing
of what I cannot speak: that I eat mud
because I can’t swallow this thick rain peacefully,
that I understand leafless branches’
sorrow
having managed to exist
past [...]
What exactly is this relationship between big hair and handicapped animals in American society? The bigger your hair, the more likely you are to share your life with a domesticated animal missing a limb. Case in point: the tripod canine hobbling around the pool at our motel in El Rio, Oklahoma and his owner, the [...]
A marriage certificate. “I do.” “I do.” It seems simple at the time, but of course it isn’t. And what happens in the meantime surely contributes to that inflated word count at the end. Years of talking to, at, past each other. The good, the bad, the miscommunicated. The beginning of the end: circumlocution, the talking around the problem, the denial that anything is wrong. The acknowledgement that things are very, very wrong. A flurry of words, pleas, begging. And finally: silence, and a legal process that stands in for resolution.
A photographic reflection on Lauren Espineli’s time in Egypt.
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