Fissured Tongue Series

Cortisol Ain’t Love But a Liar 
Golden Shovel After Ocea​n Vuong
by Dana Tenille Weekes
​Fissured Tongue Series Vol VI  |  May 2025​

“errantry" by J G Orudjev. Mixed media collage, 5 x 7 inches, 2022

Cortisol Ain’t Love But a Liar
Golden Shovel After Ocean Vuong

tripped over tender roots      get up   get up—I’ll

​never run back   never made to sprint backward   I’ll leave
wounds veining      bright red & full moon & never this
what ifs like a vicious cradle    keep rocking in place

nowhere to run      nowhere is tender        nowhere is spotless

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About the Author
Dana Tenille Weekes (she/her) lives in the swirl of Washington, DC, where she navigates the worlds of law, policy, and politics. Her published and forthcoming works are in A Gathering of the Tribes, Apogee, Callaloo, Obsidian, The Elevation Review, SWIMM, Torch Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and was a Rhino Poetry’s Founders’ Prize finalist. Dana is the daughter of Bajan immigrants and is the first in her family to be born in the United States. Say “hello” to her on Instagram @danatenilleweekes.

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About the Work
The borrowed line in this golden shovel is an intention in an Ocean Vuong poem that is doubtfully wishful, and unrewarded. Like Vuong, I wanted to fail in honoring the line’s intention. So, I asked myself, “What have I not left spotless, and, honestly, needed to be okay about it?” Then I asked myself, “How can I pour a mess on this page where I must lean into two constraints, writing in less than 20 minutes and writing a golden shovel?” The answer was a relationship in my 30s, where the urgency of needing to leave became apparent when I finally (finally, finally) realized that cortisol’s feverish work was taking the place of healthy love.

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About the Author’s Process
I first wrote this piece during my sacred time with friend and amazing poet, Zia Wang. Zia suggested that we use part of the time to generate a golden shovel in 20 minutes. For a few days prior, I was sitting with Ocean Vuong’s Time is a Mother, so I decided to turn to a random page and pull a line. The page was 21, and the line that immediately called me was, “I’ll leave this place spotless” from the poem, “You Guys.” I view writing with time constraints as an opportunity to lean into my freedom. If I only have 10 to 20 minutes, I can write whatever the hell I want. I abandon the self-critic entirely, giving me the immediacy to feel my feelings instead of thinking them. For this poem, I needed to be free to describe the running of the mind when there is an urgency to leave (because cortisol has finished its dirty work). With the constraint from the golden shovel, I had the freedom to be messy, but I needed to make brevity my entourage. I only had five lines to work with, allowing me to create the mess, but with great discernment of how far the mess could spill out.

About the Artist 
​J G Orudjev (she/her) is a mixed media artist, collagist, and sculptor living and working outside of Washington DC. Her work explores the nature of memory, transformative and transitory states, and the act and language of making meaning. "Collage is uniquely suited to this path because it is fundamentally reflective of the ways we construct narrative from association — the strata of image and context that provide the basis for both our private archetypes, and our shared visual language."
J G’s work has appeared in print both domestically and internationally, has been selected by jury to show in galleries throughout the United States, and is part of several private collections. She is a member of NOMA, a cooperative gallery, where she fulfills a roll as a member coordinator. She also works as an artistic and curatorial consultant to a regionally recognized framer and gallerist. Find her online at bio.link/jgorudjev

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