INVERTED SYNTAX

I N V E R T E D S Y N T A X

FISSURED TONGUE SERIES

“The Red String," Kiera Fisher. Multimedia magazine, colored paper, glue on mixed media paper, 14 x 11 in., 2024

Welcome to Fissured Tongue Volume VII
May 2026

Volume VII offers up work that glides between grief, humor, theory, and work that moves through bodies, systems, and language, thriving under pressure, and nothing seems to quite hold still long enough to become stable meaning.

Welcome to lobby-lit cities, digital countries, horoscope constellations, and overheard histories.

Here, everything feels unstable, yet oddly precise at the same time. Identities arrive in collaged fragments, and even texts we use as placeholders start doing emotional work. What you meant as a stand-in starts embodying emotional weight and requiring your attention, because even Lorem ipsum wants to be seen.

You will be seen.
Step right in. Have a look.

Fissured Tongue Volume VII is curated and edited by the following Inverted Syntax Editors: Nawal Nader-French, Allissa Balint, Jesica Davis.
Work was selected by Allissa Balint and Nawal Nader-French

"Once Upon a Honeymoon," Anne Wong. Oil and oil pastel on canvas, 80 x 60 cm, 2026

Aubade as Un-True Crime
by Trinity Catlin
Fissured Tongue Series Vol VII | May 2026

Catlin's poem blends together Clarice Lispector’s “The Crime of the Mathematics Professor” with a night at a Western-themed birthday party in Los Angeles, and memory, desire, and Eros blur into one unfolding question of whether love is a type of departure or a burial.

“Red Gesture," J G Orudjev. Mixed media collage, 2022

Wonder Eye
by Christiana Drevets
Fissured Tongue Series Vol VII | May 2026

“Wonder Eye” is part of a series of poems inspired by Jakob Böhme’s 17th-century visionary cosmology and his diagram “The Philosophical Sphere or the Wonder Eye of Eternity.” The poem's speaker moves between digital and analog worlds, observing shifting identities and memory, as in the lines:

“standing in a digital country,
i hold a spare-thread argument with a version of myself i despise.”

"The Fieldwork Scroll [final section]," Owen Brown, on Emily Wolahan's chapbook Fieldwork. Acrylic and pen on Duralar, 14 x 32 in., 2017

Notes on Poetry
by Justin Goodman
Fissured Tongue Series Vol VII | May 2026

This ars poetica treats lyric as a “-scape.” Sound and language shift and “the poem is self-care because it is bodily” and “falling and breaking is part of their descendants’ flight pattern.”

"Myriorama 341," Owen Brown. Acrylic, pen and colored prints on panel, 12 x 12 in., 2023

Libra
by Sophia Terazawa
Fissured Tongue Series Vol VII | May 2026

"As early as October, so too despair runs out. Mutual,

the blade of grass,
the look that says:
Between you and me, I’d rather burn up."

Who decides responsibility when crisis is shared and no one is outside its reach? Part of a constellation of horoscope poems that rethink dreaming as a way of reading collective futures, Terazawa's poem, "Libra" is a compression of ethics and survival into the same inseparable field.

"Untitled Stills," S. Okorefe. 35mm gelatin silver negatives arranged on paper, 11 × 15 in., 2026.

GUYS I KNEW IN COLLEGE
by Claude Clayton Smith
Fissured Tongue Series Vol VII | May 2026

"Guys I knew in College" could be a campus speed-dating catalogue or a study in how myth is created. Either way, lives of college guys the speaker knew are reduced to traits, achievements, rumors, and headlines. Even though set in the 60s, the piece shows how people are often condensed from and into fragments, and how identity gets unevenly assigned and remembered. While some college guys are remembered in detail, others are merely a footnote.

Smith's piece reminds us of selective visibility, where not everyone gets fully seen, just what sticks long enough to be repeated at a party.

“Short Hours," J G Orudjev. Mixed media collage, 3 x 3 in., 2022

Decepción
by Rosalie Hendon
Fissured Tongue Series Vol VII | May 2026

“You think you know the word, that
it’s the same because it sounds the same.”

Resemblance between languages creates a site of confusion where deception and disappointment separate only in hindsight.
"Decepción," unpacks false cognates as both linguistic slip and emotional misreading.

“Fidelity," Radoslav Rochallyi. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 210 x 220 cm, 2025

Two Poems:
citron (rejection as a lemon)
&
poem for tumblr user vanshistuff
by jp thorn
Fissured Tongue Series Vol VII | May 2026

These poems wonderfully trace feelings of intimacy and alienation through close attention to everyday objects and to the body, showing how we tend to process life through fragmented thoughts, mirroring our patterns of internet circulation. And how we sustain vulnerability in disconnected and interrupted spaces, while still yearning for connection and proximity.

"Myriorama 290," Owen Brown. Acrylic, pen and colored plastic on panel, 12 x 12 in., 2023

Carvalho
by Heath Hounds
Fissured Tongue Series Vol VII | May 2026

In this tender meditation on the inheritance of names, “Carvalho” explores the challenge of identity through the weight of a surname. Hounds blends love and shame into one another giving the piece a stream-like cadence, which in the same breath, holds linguistic displacement and memory

“My father: tall, adaptable and malleable. Kind, quick-witted, charming and vile.

Never mine, never his.”

"Warm Winter Triptych R," Owen Brown. Acrylic on watercolor paper, 15 x 11 in., 2023

Lorem Ipsum
by E. Briskin
Fissured Tongue Series Vol VII | May 2026

An innovative work that turns filler text into a metaphor for contemporary experience. Sentences look coherent but meaning is deferred or dissolves. At its center, the use of "lorem ipsum" becomes a key image for meaning that is both present and absent, a recognizable structure emptied of content, maybe spilling through the bar, the lobby, and the city, just as a placeholder would for a world that feels increasingly unreadable.

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