Articles

As you talk, it seems that a lily strolling in your voice Talk to me I want to hear you You were the gardener of your voice And your laughter a flock of white doves that fly at once I love you like adhan at dawn like the road that leads to sleep I love …

Marianne von Willemer to Goethe, circa 1816 I sent one to you while you were at work— as if an artichoke could make a wife of me—a thistle for your fork, Cynara cardunculus, after a quick dip in olive oil and lemon. “Poison,” you once wrote, was not some Secret Thief, but “the intensity of …

In the beginning, before we knew how to move our bodies to the beat of sultry music, before we knew how to intertwine our tired tongues, God decided, on a lonely Sunday afternoon, that they were bored.             They decided to make people and places and things. Light and darkness. War and peace. In an …

My stomach and mouth are furious. My eye is misbehaving, and the doctor says, “Do not fly.” This also translates to: You cannot fly . . . to New Jersey . . . to eat! She is Asian, like me; a food freak, like me. She knows the enormity of her words. Covid did this …

Bellingham Review is so excited to share with you a folio of poetry that emerged from the 50th Association for Ethnic Studies Conference at California State University, Los Angeles, in 2022. This poetry folio on home, nourishment, and community features the creative work of Shayda Kafai, María I. Morales-Sánchez, Nicole Leopardo, and Pau Abustan. Poetry …

I first encountered asemic writing through the work of Christopher Patton, which I’ve seen both sprawling across his wooden dining table and in museum shows. Asemic writing carefully curates its materials, and I am honored to have had my junk mail reborn in one of Chris’s works. The piece was titled “Siri Falls Among the …

I was in a room with Gertrude Stein and some undergrads. We were meeting indeterminacy together for the first time. I drew a messy sketch on the blackboard, little overlapping circles inside a bigger lumpy vaguely circle thing. —Anyone know what this is? I thought I was being funny. My illegible handwriting and inscrutable diagrams …

The podcast host asks “When did you realize you’re queer?” but no age counts the same knuckles, wrinkles and twinks, ear and armpit hairs, orthopedic aches the real daddy, time kudzuing reason, premature efforts to fit in and feel good when feeling different is always the first queer feeling. “What was the thing that made …

Hanggang Sa Muli We see our dead everywhere. A butterfly, a bat—Lola? Dad? Is that you? Just today, I saw my father in the long finger of an okra, overgrown past peak deliciousness. It waggled at me— naku, not even good for deep-frying!— and reminded: tingnan mo! Always look close at your garden, at your …

You can read/view Michelle Peñaloza’s poems and collages in BR’s Issue 86 here. I. I started making collages at the start of this year, the day after I learned the pregnancy, we’d been trying to make happen for two years, was not viable. The day I waited for a way to help my body—what is …