I N V E R T E D
The Fissured Tongue Series
Image is a Still from "Set Theory Orgasm" video; A Visual Poem Performed by Cynthia Kneen and Jude Landsman, 2021
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Fissured Tongue | Volume Three Welcome to Fissure Tongue Volume 3! Check out the introductory letter from the editor. Cover Art Still captured from video performance "Set Theory Orgasm" by Cynthia Kneen. Jesica Davis is Managing Editor of the Fissured Tongue series. |
In this volume
Peruse below or check out a PDF version:
Peruse below or check out a PDF version:
"Untitled" by Rupert D. Turnbull; oil on canvas; 28 x 36 in.; 1938; open source from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Boundary by Grace Ann Rogers
" This particular poem attempts to unravel some ideas surrounding translation, borders, and the blundering, baby-fawn legged inadequacy of English when used to talk about a place it was not created to describe — a place its speakers colonized." — Grace Ann Rogers |
Still from "Set Theory Orgasm" video; A Visual Poem Performed by Cynthia Kneen and Jude Landsman, 2021
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Set Theory Orgasm by Cynthia Kneen
About this exquisite performance piece, Cynthia writes, "I wrote "Set Theory Orgasm" after reading the Danish poet, Inger Christensen, to see if I could generate a piece around #’s without doing the work of Fibonacci’s mathematical sequencing. I chose a sexual event from a female’s point of view. Unlike the elegance of Christensen’s work, this piece is sensual, humorous, low class, almost clownish, maybe even tragic, certainly tender and absurd." |
"Tintype of a woman"; collodion and silver on iron with lacquer; 3 3/8 x 2 3/8 in.; 1856-1900; open source from the National Museum of African American History and Culture
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Two poems by Kirslyn Schell-Smith:
black.girl.magic something about 1999 "brown like but I’m still pale in the winter / like trying to go through the airport without getting “randomly selected” / for a more thorough body search / like staring at me and my white wife when we are holding hands at the grocery store/ like paying more attention to me walking through the electronics section/ brown like / my mom asking why is there a video camera pointing at only the “ethnic hair care” section at Wal-Mart" from black.girl.magic |
"Flowers" by H. Lyman Saÿen; oil on canvas; 30 1⁄8 x 36 1⁄8 in; 1915; open source from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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In Every Flower by Sophie Braxton
"We watched and listened. Our thoughts were not words; they were the sounds of the water. I do not remember any words from outside of the windows. I must have forgotten them all. Words are easy to forget." Enjoy Sophie Braxton's short fictional piece written when the writer was 16 from the point of view of a cockroach. |
"Figurative Abstraction" by unidentified artist; brush and ink with pencil on paper; 23 1⁄2 x 20 1⁄8 in.; ca. 1930-1938; open source from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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A Ghazal for the Children by Shreya Vikram
"The tongue does not refuse, it selects. Trust me when I say there’s a difference. The children search/ for the wrong words, learn to curl them in. What is unselected is drawn missing." |
"Untitled" by B. Jesus Newton; oil on canvas; 22 x 32 5/8 in.; n.d.; open source from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Two poems by Delia Tramontina:
Your voice is empty and has space to hold gerbils and beach balls Your voice would rather be silently reading Delia Tramontina describes these two poems as “an exploration of power, role, collectivity, belonging and lack of belonging.” She writes, “This entire project was created to speak to the experience of looking outside oneself, to see the familiar become odd and absurd. These two pieces specifically deal with feeling foreign in our home and how we carry locations within us, how we become alien to ourselves after becoming habituated to a world that doesn’t see us.” |
"Cubist Analysis" by John E. Thompson; oil on canvas; 12 1/8 x 10 in.; 1915; open source from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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The Node Dancer by John Schertzer
“I think "The Node Dancer" tries to address both the lack of a central node of identity, and also that limit of reaching and understanding others. Both of these factors I believe are at the base of any kind of ethics.” |
"Composition" by Andree Rexroth; pencil and watercolor on paper; 9 x 6 in.; ca. 1935-1943; open source from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Two poems by Shanita Bigelow:
Aerate: Far afield Hone "Let it wreck this house. Let it be another body disembodied—make her more than the one she came in. Make more of her than a name we mourn. Make more of her than the shape of a forlorn whistle. Make her again—a body, a voice, flux and delight." from “Aerate: Far afield” |
"Back To The Real World 2" by Nazrene Alsiro; film photograph; 2020
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The Mandela Effect* by AT Hincapie
The Mandela Effect is a term coined for “collective false memories” and beautifully approached in AT Hincapie's double-voice poem, about which they write, "much of the work of remembering often falls on children, on the survivors who become tasked with internalizing their traumas while still getting all the details correct for the next generation." |
"The Poet on Pegasus Entering the Realm of the Muses" by Elbridge Kingsley; wood engraving; 6 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.; 1890; open source from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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When Memory Becomes Mythology by Soramimi Hanarejima
"She explains how good lies must be told like secrets. It should seem as though we’re revealing something important that few are privy to. But just a glimpse, a fraction of the rich detail and emotional complexity—a concise confidence, not a disgorging divulging. There must be much more to the lie than what is told." from When Memory Becomes Mythology |
"A Violet Note" by James Abbott McNeill Whistler; Chalk and pastel on grey paper; 10 7/8 x 7 1/8 in; 1885; open source from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Four Poems by grace (ge) gilbert:
OK Scott I’m moving out now. Listen I am just trying to wait in line for an Impossible Burger after crying in my car & I don’t know how to interpret this moment of ambiguous & highly commercial loneliness Walking along the Susquehanna River there is a personal strength I am almost reluctant to uncover Aubade overlooking the highway a moment ensues in the broke-open self; the city a subtitle across the plane from Aubade overlooking the highway |
"Still Life" by Earl Horter; watercolor; 15 x 18 1⁄2 in.; 1939; open source from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Two poems by Jessica Temple:
Caking Enough What is a little? What is "enough"? How can such small, tight prose poems have such powerful reverberations? Find out with Jessica Temple's pieces Caking and Enough. |
"Self-Portrait" by Malvin Gray Johnson; oil on canvas; 38 1⁄4 x 30 in.; 1934; open source from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Cheat House by Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah
The opening lines of Cheat House read, "We’re always watching. Watching the forked pathway behind the hedgerow, we’re watching. Just watching. Someone has opened the outside door & we wait to hear how all these wounds started, we’re alive [...]" |
"Roseate Spoonbills" study for book Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom by Abbott Handerson Thayer; oil on paperboard; 22 7⁄8 x 26 1⁄4 in.; ca. 1905-1909; open source from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Two Poems by D.S. Maolalai:
Heat. One of those summer storms. "beside us the earth of the ditch starts to rise. it was dry a second ago; now you expect toads. it's like this for minutes - our silence a roar and our sandwiches soaking. then the sun" from One of those summer storms. |
"Trees" by H. Lyman Saÿen; oil on canvas; 21 1⁄8 x 18 1⁄8 in.; ca. 1912-1914; open source from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Two Poems by Rachel Tang:
16 Blessings for the City of Los Angeles Post-chromatic Rachel Tang writes, "to memorialize something, is to come to terms with the romanticization of your own experiences. These poems are my way of leaning into those feelings, rather than leaving them behind." |
"The Thundershower (study for painting)" by H. Lyman Saÿen; tempera, pencil and printed paper on paperboard; 21 3/4 x 27 3/4 in.; ca. 1916; open source from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Two Poems by Matthew Burkett:
Where It Dissolves Unplaceably There "It can never quite be placed it drifts red blur so in integument tectonics bourdon and suspense passing by a tidy doppler thins blood its caricature" from Unplaceably There |
"Nirwana" by Max Reyher; oil on wood; 15 5/8 x 19 3/4 in.; 1928; open source from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Dogs by J. D. Schraffenberger
"Sometimes you can almost picture how you’ll die You see a car the ditch rain through the window I climb up out of the dark to see the neighborhood whole It’s the shape of a mirror it’s the shape of a hole" from Dogs As a child J. D. Schraffenberger suffered a recurring dream of being chased by packs of dogs, he writes: "however much I might try to interpret them as literary symbols of human mortality, mere metonymies for the wild. I have never believed in a theistic god — not least because those theologies are too legible to me, not mysterious enough for the strange beauty of the cosmos — but I do believe the dogs are there, waiting." |
"Tattoo Flash" by unidentified artist; pen and colored ink on cardboard; 8 1/8 x 10 1/8 in.; 20th century; open source from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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After the Regional Cat-Snack Sales Managers’ Meeting by Brad Rose
Brad Rose explains his writing process, saying, "In "After the Regional Cat-Snack Sales Managers’ Meeting," as with much of my work, I’m concerned with word play, defamiliarization, the juxtaposition of unlikely associations, and dark humor. When writing, I try to follow three precepts: 1) “Every view of things that is not strange is false,”— Paul Valéry.” 2) “The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.” — GK Chesterton. 3) “The ugly may be beautiful, but the pretty, never.” — Paul Gauguin" |
"Figure in Glass" by Arthur B. Davies; drypoint on paper; 6 1⁄4 x 5 1⁄2 in.; 1916-1917; open source from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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That One Thing with the Wine by Katlyn Tjerrild
" “Oh—good,” you say, which is a stupid way to respond because it sounds like you expected her to wash the raspberries and would’ve been pissed if she hadn’t, but you’ve paused too long now to say “thanks” without it sounding like you’re amending your response rather than clarifying it. So kick yourself about that for a while, while you scoop out a bruised section of banana and throw it away, and then become suspicious that they’re all judging you for food waste and once you’ve performed a couple recitations of kill me kill me kill me as penance[...]" from That One Thing with the Wine |
