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  • View folktales-inspired art and photo in the digital gallery.

The girl whose legs are sawn open lies with one foot hanging over the side of the bed because it hurts less.

    

Everything is brazen & glorious in the teeth of that hound. Blisters are forming in us & we are one & we are entirety.

‘长路归来焉能识。/ After a long journey, recognizable still.’

demeter, i shouldn't have to tell you this, but i never did take up gardening the way i promised you i would.

Ruth woke with something hot in her ribcage. Shrike / at the window, talons sharp as glass.

At five-thirty the rains tremble and begin.

It is winter again, white flecks of snow / ticking across the fields like lice.

Pure, sweltering Australian summer. CHERRY (17) and BUCKLE (18) pick their way barefoot along a shallow creek that shimmers in the midday sun, all cutoff shorts and tan skin. Around them, there is nothing but dry bush for miles… (read more)

& the child cries for his mother / as if this will save him.

“She wakes up at eight, goes for a morning prowl / At Yishun Park, eyes the folks for their / Sweet vessels and soft skins but ends up / Just having breakfast at The Hawker Centre.”

Our Heavenly Bodies

My mother is superstitious: / A believer in the mystical and obsolete. / She locks the house on Friday the thirteenth. / She does not let me whistle at night. 

Poetry by Chiedza Mupita

We never have to agree with each other in the way we work with these myths– one person can use Ovid in one way, and the next person can come along and use the same stories for a completely different purpose.There is no correct reading of myth or canonical version: there is no “right” or “wrong” way to tell these stories, and I think that is why we continue to be drawn to them.

(LIGHTS UP. No one is on stage except for the COMFORT WOMEN. They are standing in a line downstage. They are only lit when they speak individually.)

Tráth dá raibh, there was a night as black and tousled as the feathers of some pagan crow god, the boughs of the rowan tree outside my grandparents house shaking and pointing at the sky.

The fish is warm and wet in my palm. Scales slip off its corpse. The delicate underbelly splits easily under the curve of my blade.

Check out more of the folktales-inspired artwork and photography included in this issue!