I N V E R T E D   
​S Y N T A X

The Fissured Tongue Series  

​Fissured Tongue | Volume One

This volume reflects on "invisibility, absence, and the unequivocal assertion of being" (Jennifer Reimer on her Keşke poems).​

​Cover  “Things Found Inside Women’s Bodies: Bowl“ by Salma Ahmad Caller. Watercolour, collage, graphite, Indian Ink, gesso, gold pigment. dust, 54.5cm x 19cm, cropped, 2018

In this Volume 

“Decolonization honors how powerful our words, as manifestations of our lived experiences, are that which exist inside of us. Speaking our words aloud is how we move stories out of our bodies, so that we can see our internalizations twofold: what we’re telling ourselves and what the world is telling us. Unlearning is the ethereal knowing that we were chosen. Chosen to do this work because we are the EPITOME. Chosen because we have everything we need; we lack nothing.”— Malanna Wheat. 

3 poems from André O. Hoilette, whose poems weave concrete forms, Patois, and rich, imagistic language to conjure a range of experiences and emotions, from a supernatural entity to the isolation of COVID times and the way society devalues and seeks to destroy Black lives. Check out "one duppy deh 'bout," "the storm opened us," and "fear of the police."

 Tor Strand's ekphrastic meditation on corporal ephemerality, "Body," which explores the limits of comprehension and mortality. 

​Adria Bernardi's fascinating multi-media piece "Palladian" explores the way easily overlooked architectural elements weave themselves into our lives, identities, and moments in time.

​Nicole Zdeb's dreamy piece "Love Song in E" is a delightful exercise in assonance, using only words with "e" vowel sounds, try reading it out loud and see what mood it evokes for you!

​"Floating Woman" is an exploration of meaning, identity, and the dictionary. Beatriz Seelaender describes her work as showing us "how volatile definitions can get, hopefully meditating on meaning (or meaninglessness) and whether something really is defined by the sum of its parts. A suspended guide to ideal meaning, as one would find in a dictionary, is after all quite different from what words are when in action." 

​Jenny Grassl write about her three poems, "Murder, suicide, and love exceed our capacities for ordinary language. In these three poems I have tried to go beyond the narrative, into textures of experience."  Reading them indeed feels like a corporal experience beyond the cerebral; check them out and let them wash over you, again and again.

“Untitled (Heart-Shaped Face)” by Daisy Patton. Oil on Archival Print on Panel, 30 x 24 in, 2018

"I was twelve when a man first caused by body to Change. I was wearing a summer dress, sleeveless and flowered, short because I had grown nearly five inches that year. I saw one of my elementary school teachers with his wife and children at an ice cream shop near a beach. As he saw me, registered me, half listened to one of my friends talk about how our first year of middle school had gone, I felt my breasts tingle and grow. I immediately folded my arms across my chest." -- from Beholder. Rebecca Grey Wilder's "Beholder" makes palpable the ways in which women endure and internalize societal expectations of female identity, the male gaze, sexual trauma, heredity, and the invisibility of mental health issues.

"Expedition Oriental Body" by Salma Ahmad Caller. Indian Ink, collage, graphite, gold dust pigment on acid free cartridge paper, 59.4cm x 84.1cm, 2018.

​Jennifer Reimer’s Keşke poems explore longing and the power of female imagination to turn that which is "invisible, absent or wrecked into an unequivocal assertion of being.” Reimer writes, "I wished to capture the space of longing filling up with the speaker’s own self in the way that bodies fill with breath, tides fill the coast with seawater and pages fill with words.”

“Things Found Inside Women’s Bodies: Bowl“ by Salma Ahmad Caller. Watercolour, collage, graphite, Indian Ink, gesso, gold pigment. dust, 54.5cm x 19cm, cropped, 2018,

​Describing his story “2020 A.D.,” author Kevin Sharp says, “This story is a synthesis of two thoughts. First, what if instead of looking at a person’s life as a long, novel-like narrative, we took inventory of it as a series of short stories (sometimes related, sometimes not)? Second was the idea that all of us are time travelers — though less like Delorean driving Marty McFly than like Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim. We take regular journeys to and from the past, whether spurred on by a song, a scent, a photo, or simply the longing in our hearts.”

“Oculus of The Body” by Salma Ahmad Caller. Watercolor Collage, Graphite, Indian ink, & Gold pigment, 76.5 x 55.5 cm, cropped, 2018

​"These poems are an experiment with memoir in poetry, a curiosity about how childhood and the dream world begin to hover along the same landscape, the delight and alarm of making a meaning, a reality, an image from the hazy fringes of their memory." Read Imitation Dreams: Three poems by Marie Conlan. 

“Untitled" by Tameca L Coleman, Digital Photograph, cropped, 2018

John Schertzer says about “Diagram E”: “It is part of a series entitled “Plan for a Broken Bowl,” which I think of as a meditation on misunderstanding. Each diagram is an attempt at apprehension and breakage, hopefully leading to better and more life affirming misunderstandings, through semantic and syntactical play in a way that aligns closer to a body’s way of reaching out to things and selves in the world.” 

Photograph by Tameca Coleman

"Store" by Keith Rondinelli is an enigmatic piece that left us ruminating on it days later. 
​“The food starts to get low. I pretend I don’t notice. Shawna starts a new mural in the unisex bathroom. This time she is using chocolate frosting. The mural doesn’t resemble anything in the outer world—it is strange and inward-seeming. I stand staring, perplexed. In the patterns she’s drawn I think I see muscles, arteries, organs.
“What is it?” I ask.
“It’s a map of my inner-space,” she says. “It will help me find my way.”

Art by Daisy Patton

In her essay, “The Photograph as a Reminder That We Are Already Dead,” Daisy Patton examines how funeral photography reflects our own mortality back to us, how an ephemeral moment is captured forever, or at least until the image perishes. 
“The photograph marks that moment of loss, and it is physical proof of devotion being performed […] we are looking at memorials to remembrance but have no idea who the people are any longer. Susan Sontag once asserted that photography “converts the whole world into a cemetery.” To look at an old photograph is to be reminded that we too will die.”

About the Fissured Tongue Series
We receive quite a bit of stunning work. Work that speaks to us, turns us inside out and articulates the visceral, work that we cannot fit into two issues per year.  We created Inverted Syntax’s Fissured Tongue series to bring you pieces that speak to Inverted Syntax’s mission: fictional stories, creative non-fiction, poetry, and everything in-between.

All submissions to Inverted Syntax are also considered for Fissured Tongue.

Fissured Tongue Series edited by Managing Editor Jesica Davis 
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