The poem is an amazement, Onfwan Fouad (Translated by Dr. Yousef Hanna)

 

(Excerpt of a dialogue with a woman who dedicates her fingers for metaphor).

- Come, let us suppose that language is an old wound on the waist of a lonely woman, and that a stab in the throat at night was the cause of all these colloquial songs. 

Do you remember the first blood that flowed within your forefinger and thumb? To hug a white paper?

- Poetry opens like a wound, and alike the rest of things unfold. This existence is a wound, and we are its scab, whenever the one of us suffers, that wound would be incited.

The first blood that flowed from my body when I was a child would quickly stumble with the void, gravity embracing her all the time. It was a deep wound on the knee, and after that the falls successively continued to this very day.

I remember being in pain then, but soon the pain turned into a strange pleasure, and I experienced feeling a pain that cannot be summed up in a few words.

Since then, my friendship with blood started. The second station was what have flowed from between my thighs without any streamside to gather, or any stone on which I could stand before drowning in the stream of astonishment. I had no prior awareness of that river that is pouring every month, no one told me about.

Regarding the blood of writing, it is white, so white, that secret writing that requires an intellectual effort to encrypt what should be, and reveal what should not.

As for the whiteness, it is an area fenced with margins that needs an effort to blur it with colors, or a temporary pleasure at the moment of turning it over, and plowing it with words and meanings that need a sharp and serious scythe to harvest it later.

As Roland Barthes said, "Writing is frightening; it grows like a seed, and it keeps threatening to reveal a secret.”

Whiteness also does that to me and more...

عنفوان فؤاد - الدهشة قصيدة 

(مقطع من حوار مع امرأة تنذر أصابعها للمجاز)

- تعالي لنفترض أن اللغة جرح قديم في خاصرة امرأة وحيدة، وأن طعنة في حنجرة الليل كانت سببا في كل هذه المواويل .هل تذكرين أول دم سال من بين سبابتك والإبهام؛ ليعانق ورقة بيضاء؟

- مثل جرح ينفتح الشعر، ومثله تتفتح بقية الأشياء. وهذا الوجود عبارة عن جرح، نحن قشرته كلما تألم أحدنا تهيج ذاك الجرح. 

أول دم سال من جسدي كنت طفلة سرعان ما تتعثر بالفراغ، والجاذبية تعانقها طوال الوقت. كان جرحا غائرا على مستوى الركبة، وتوالت بعدها السقطات لغاية اليوم.

أذكر أنني تألمت ساعتها، لكن سُرعان ما تحول الألم إلى لذة غريبة، خبرت مشاعر الألم التي لا يمكن اختصارها في بضع الكلمات. 

منذاك بدأت صداقتي مع الدماء. ثاني محطة هي ما سال من بين فخذي دون ضفاف تلمه أو حجارة أقف عليها قبل الغرق في تيار الدهشة. لم أكن على دراية مسبقة بذاك النهر الذي يصب في كل شهر لم يخبرني أحد بشأنه. 

بخصوص دماء الكتابة فهي بيضاء بيضاء تلك الكتابة السرية التي تستلزم جهدا فكريا لتشفير ما يجب، وكشف مالا يجب.

أما البياض فتلك مساحة مسيجة بالهوامش تحتاج جهدا لطمسها بالألوان، أو متعة مؤقتة لحظة تقليبها، وحرثها بالكلمات والمعاني التي تحتاج منجلا حادا وجادا لحصادها فيما بعد.

كما قال بارت:" الكتابة تخيف؛ إنها تنمو مثل بذرة،

وتظل تهدد بإفشاء سر"

كذلكَ البياض يفعل بي ذلكَ وأكثر..

**************************

“Just fill the crack with gold water” 

It's not important

No problem tearing up the happy picture I posted,

There is no problem in breaking beauty as a precious piece

Then fill the fractions with boiling water with gold.

 

It really doesn't matter

But I did it...

But I broke it.

 

Because a month ago

I couldn't smile like that

unconditionally

A month ago

I was scared of someone would see through me

What I do hide from me

What I'm hiding from you

 

A month ago

I was afraid of people

Like a raped child who did not read about the doctrine of the scandal

I was sick of the light

Like a retired bat out of the dark

I used to be…

And I think I still am.

It's an impasse being afraid of breathing shadows

Exhausting to drink on an empty stomach your fear.

 

The big deal is

Although I didn't mean to see what you were telling me,

However, I still commit it.

 

Do you know what our problem is?

Seeing that happy picture on your lit screen

In your heart sparkle 

In a word under your tongue...

That picture made me feel; for the first time;

Since I was happy after you

And that cut wrists will make me

Appear better.

” فقط أملأ الشرخ بماء الذهب” 

قصيدة للشاعرة الجزائرية “عنفوان فؤاد“

ليسَ بالأمر المهم

لا مشكلة في تمزيق الصورة السعيدة التي نشرتها،

لا مشكلة في تكسير الجمال كقطعةٍ ثمينةٍ

ثم ملء الكسور بماء يغلي بالذهب.

حقًا لا يهم

لكني فعلتها..

لكني كسرتها..

لأنه قبل شهر

لم أستطع أن أبتسم هكذا

بشكل غير مشروط

قبل شهر

كنت أخشى أن يرى شخص ما من خلالي

ما أخفيه عني

ما أخفيه عنك

قبل شهر

كنتُ خائفة من الناس

كطفلة مغتصبة لم تقرأ عن فقه الفضيحة

كنتُ أشمئز من الضوء

كخفاش متقاعد من العتمة

كنتُ…

وأعتقد أنني ما زلت كذلك.

مأزق أن تخشى ظلالاً تتنفّس

مرهق أن تشرب على الريق خوفك.

الأمر المهم هو

على الرغم من أنني لم أكن أقصد أن أرى ما كنت تقوله لي،

إلا انني ما زلت أقترفه.

أتعرف ما مشكلتنا؟

رؤية تلك الصورة السعيدة على شاشتك المضاءة

في لمعة قلبك

في كلمة تحت لسانك..

تلك الصورة جعلتني أشعر؛ لأوّل مرّة؛

منذ أن كنت سعيدة بعدك

وأن المعصمين المقطعين سيجعلاني

أظهر بشكل أفضل.

**********************

Mercy dog

Mercy dog addicted to gouging out his eyes

Take off your head

Sorry, I mean your invisible hat

Then pluck your mind out very carefully

Put it in a sealed box

And read the moon talisman

Hang that gut on the clothesline.

Regain our consciousness 

In the chill room

Our gazes are fixed on the door of nothingness.

Not exactly

The word stuck on the top of your forehead

Is disobedient to devour the wings inside me

(Paper, Stone, Scissors) *

The stone cracked the head of speech

The scissors raped the silence

The paper aborted the story.

The way to you

Devoid of signals

Your shadow leaned on a snake skin.

Shake my hand

Thus, mummified dragonflies raid us.

You can drink the juice of your visions with closed eyes

The eye rests from overturning of events

Inside a sealed box.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ

* (Rock paper scissors) is a hand game usually played between two people, in which each player simultaneously forms one of three shapes with an outstretched hand. These shapes are "rock", "paper", and "scissors".

ــ عنفوان فؤاد 

كلب الرحمة 

كلب الرحمة أدمن اقتلاع عينيه

اِخلع رأسك 

عفوًا، أقصد قبعتك اللامرئية 

ثم اِنتزع عقلك بحذرٍ شديدٍ 

ضعه في صندوق محكم الغلق

واقرأ عليه تعويذة القمر 

علّق على حبل الغسيل تلك الأمعاء.

نستعيد وعينا

في غرفة التبريد 

ونظراتنا مثبّتة على باب العدم.

ليس تمامًا

الكلمة العالقة أعلى جبينك 

عصيّة على افتراس الأجنحة التي داخلي

(ورقة، حجر، مقص) 

الحجر شجّ رأس الكلام 

المقصّ اغتصب الصمت 

الورقة اجهضت الحكاية.

الطريق إليك 

عارٍ من الإشارات 

ظلّك متكأ على جلد أفعى.

صافحني 

هكذا تداهمنا يعاسيب محنّطة. 

بإمكانك شرب عصير رؤاك بعيون مغمضة

العين تستريح من تقليب الأحداث 

داخل صندوق محكم الغلق.

Onfwan Fouad is an Algerian poetess, translator, story writer and artist from Aures, the east of Algeria. She was a lawyer for seven years as she was a university instructor for many years. Her first published poetry book in 2017 « Godot's eating his fingers» was issued in Cairo by Dar "Hona"' ELLES. As she had issued many electronics books some of them: 1 _ « I See Him, He Doesn't See Me», 2 _ « With No Boredom, My Soul Wears Me». 3 _ « Let Me Burn Death ». 4 _ « Tomorrow, You Are Mine ». 5 _ «Among Hearts' Tombs ». 6 _ « I've Debted Sadness a Message ». Her texted works were translated to French, English, Spanish, Italian, German, Romanian, Kurdish and Amazighian. She has contributed in Haiku Anthology, and she is the first feminine who wrote Hippon in The Arab World. As she contributed in another Hiaku Anthology issued by Moment Britain. She is one of Surrealism pioneers in The Middle East and North of Africa. 

Yousef Hanna, a Palestinian from the Upper Galilee who lives in Nazareth, is a doctor in Internal Medicine and has been practicing his profession for 37 years. Six years ago, he began translating poetry and literary texts from English and Romanian language into Arabic and vice versa, and is active in the translation room of the Surrealist group in North Africa and the Middle East.

Three Poems, Henry Lara

 

THE RADIATOR

Once a goddess,

She remembers a time 

when the older records inside her, 

played romance

But never motherhood

Dandelion days

Paris nights, 

and Prince Edward oysters

They are much too far now

Damaged phonographic needle

and departed roars

She stretches for their memory

And with an unused womb

There's no one to touch her 

Submerged in aloofness, subtle words now flow from her eyes 

Now, in the midst of the nickel

She is a riddle that cannot be answered

Her speaking voice has no engagements

It's her mental voice which strikes the thunder

Basic math has brought her here, 

and in silence, 

The radiator waits 

She sits

They warm each other

The violin plays

THE DRAG

In her search for security, she hasn't been able to find anything stable

As she ages, it gets worse

Voucher after voucher she's landed in randomness

SRO's have brought temporary relief but life has had its ways to subtract her additions

Bridges have covered her back but not her needs

Chapel shelters have brought temporary faith

Stolen tents and lost provisions bring a shrug, she wonders what's next

As she forages, she finds nutrition but instabilities and uncertainty line up on the radar

Hail Marys bring transient results

The new high-risers shine, senior housing stalls

The constant changing of her powerful city owes her nothing, there's nothing her strength can do

Her lifelines are running away—

Without technology, her process is slowed

She smells a few last opportunities so she goes to the payphone, sits on what's left.

She thinks of a biscuit and coffee as she inserts her coins

She hopes the receiver on the other side of the landline has acceptable news

NOSTRUM

It is not near, but it is not quite far                                                                                                                         
She can see the guillotine being prepared from a distance 
                                                                       
Usually, in her vicinity, it is put to use about once a week                                                                                  
Claiming up to four on a bad week
Earlier at dawn, her friend fried away in the hot oil canister                     
                                             
Sweltering drippings, mincers, basucos, cleavers and nose candy are rampant in her sector, 
eager to administrate their order                                                                                                                                           
The smack is loose and in a constant hunt for her                                                                                              
She knows exactly where they are, her effort to dodge them is weak       
                                           
They smell frailty in her organs and are ready to take her wit                                                                               
Her heart is bitter for them, there is a vast space within requiring them to swim in her  
It disregards their bad intentions and keeps the pumps for them coming 
The panacea is empty and the swine plays tag                                                                                                    
She hides behind the trash bin with rats as large as castoroides                                                                         
The sun will soon come up, it will be an open field of targets, the little red dots will rarely 
be missed                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
She will circle the bathhouses                                                                                                                                 
The soup lines                                                                                                                                                            
The free concerts                                                                                                                                                        
The needles                                                                                                                                                               
The wretched                                                                                                                                                             
The The Councilman                                                                                                                                                         
The Mayor                                                                                                                                                                     
The Law, the word of the holy spirit                                                                                                                  
Vultures will continue their flight                                                                                                                                                                                
And her rest                                                                                                                                                    
And her hunger                                                                                                                                                           
And her peace  
Will remain on hold     

Henry Lara is a writer from Los Angeles. His work has been featured in Dryland, Issue 8, 2018, Zyzzyva No.119, 2020 and The Los Angeles Review, 2021. His work is inspired by the city and the people of Los Angeles. Henry is on Instagram @ Angeleno Heart.                                                                                                                             

Eight Pieces, Toti O'Brien

 

And the beast

Cinco Sirenitas

Convergence (Mary and the Maid)

Hermit Falls

Jacob's Ladder

Moona

Phoenix

Urashima Taro

Toti O’Brien’s mixed media have been exhibited in group and solo shows, throughout Europe and the United States, since 1995. Her artwork is featured in various magazines: Map Literary, Silver Pinion, petrichor and New Reader, among others. She has created several book covers, illustrated five children’s books, as well as two memoirs.

Three Poems, Clara Burghelea

 

Against forgetting

Pain will whimper your chest until you know it is there,

formaldehyde dreams will keep you numb and twitching

throughout the thick of the night, waking to half-darkness

only to succumb to the swell of it, the shards of something

you cannot name will scratch the insides of your cheeks

first thing in the morning, rinsing won’t do it, tiny mints

will make you nauseous, instead, let the bitter coat your 

tongue, go down slowly, churn and thread your insides,

know that soft spells will follow, clean lines and half spaces, 

you will catch your breath while buttering bread for the kids,

after having shoeboxed a stray kitten, only to come back

itching with flea bites, dawn’s fingers probing this dazed

house, where every scraped inch knows the lack of you.

Ars Poetica

The sun comes in low, quick shadows spurring,

treetops scraping the view, an out of breath breeze.

Across the park, someone is playing the piano

from memory, scanty jazz notes spilling down 

the windowsills, the clean lines of a fading summer.

A skinny cat leaps up only to snatch the scent of 

a scrumptious sparrow, a pregnant moon in its gaze.

Above, the oozing scar of the sky, the lust of a kiss.

Whatever prowls our dreams

Trapezed along a string of white nights, hard-lunged, single-petaled whispers, moans soaped 

up with music, wine sips and machengo, chiaroscuro shadows that slant the stage, our screens that brew with desire before you philosophize too much, then run your soft tongue along 

the bruised edges, so, when are you coming? the fat palm cuddles the wooden bar counter, 

the pizza oven, flaking metaphors, my smile, we’re made of night sky, a scrawl of arteries 

that feed on the same ink blood, will this taste as good in death as it does in life? Before sunlight pours sparks under your eyelids, the hum of billboards dies out, and the ciabatta delivery man floats in on a whiff, you are snoring in your dungeon, alien head watching, and I stumble back into the gloomy afternoon, across the world, aching from spoils of yet another night. 

Clara Burghelea is a Romanian-born poet with an MFA in Poetry from Adelphi University. Recipient of the Robert Muroff Poetry Award, her poems and translations appeared in Ambit, Waxwing, The Cortland Review and elsewhere. Her collection The Flavor of The Other was published in 2020 with Dos Madres Press.

Four Poems, John Olson

 The Funniness Of Fun 

I like the way raindrops collect on the windshield gray afternoon the drops glitter look like stars the gazillions of stars you see out in rural areas away from the city plus the clickety clickety sound of rain speckling splattering the metal of the car parked in front of a drugstore sliding glass door out comes a woman all in black black sweater black pants black backpack lush thick waterfall of black hair down her shoulders and back. Next day I’m in the same spot, same time, same gray sky dropping its constellations of rain and nebulas of mist, but this time I’m a little less enthusiastic, probably because it’s colder. I’ve got the heater on full blast and it feels great. I get immersed in Kerouac. R startles me as she opens the door. We go to Mud Bay and get a few cans of cat food. Our cat’s favorite brand is running low again. These are such strange times. You never know what items are going to be hard to find. One day it’s shaving lather. The next it’s cat food. There was a report yesterday on a French news station that, due to a paper shortage, a number of book titles are going to have to wait indefinitely for publication. I think everybody feels it, the sense of things unraveling, of a general ebb in the currents and eddies of civilized life. Tsunamis of public hysteria. Waves of misinformation. A listless anomie among the young, and who can blame them? The mixture of impending doom and creepy, self-congratulatory gratification for compliance one feels while showing proof of vaccination to an officious waiter. We come home and I go for a run while R makes Greek Pasta. It’s not all that bad running in the rain. The body begins producing heat from within and the cold fresh air begins to feel a little exhilarating. Dodging puddles is both irritating and fun. It’s weird that something can be irritating and fun simultaneously. Cooking, for example. It can be a bit of a hassle, but the intricacies are fun. What a funny word fun is. Fun is funny. The word is of uncertain origin, but may be from 1680s meaning of fun “to cheat, hoax,” which may be a variant of Middle English fonnen, “befool.” It hasn’t been around that long. Is having a fun a modern concept? Seattle once had a Fun Forest. This was a 20-acre site of 20 rides – Ferris Wheel, Roller Coaster, Log Ride, Flight to Mars – which was dismantled and replaced with the Chihuly Garden of Glass Museum. Seattle got serious. High-tech. Business-oriented. Real Estate went bonkers. $2,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. $600,000 for a dumpy fixer-upper. And now we have homeless encampments everywhere, with a big one behind the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. None of which is fun. Fun is the ghostly silence left behind by the death of the Fun Forest. Fun is funnier than ever. It’s fun to stay home and avoid the traffic. Fun to reminisce. Or buy a gun. 

Rogue Emotion 

Yesterday I saw an emotion wandering around in the park and, since no one was feeling it, I went up to talk to it and see if I could get a feel for what feeling that emotion would be like. There’s nothing sadder than a lost emotion wandering around with no one to feel it. Very sad. So sad sadness doesn’t even want to be around it. Sadness has other things to do. Lots of people are sad. Sadness is busy. So what’s the deal, I said to the emotion. Nothing much, said the emotion. I see that you’re an emotion. Did the park department send you here? How might I go about feeling you? You can feel me anyway you want. But what kind of emotion are you? I don’t like to feel emotions I don’t like. Guilt, for instance. Or remorse. I’m not guilt. And I’m not remorse. So what are you then? Just lost, said the emotion. Lost and alone and not quite born yet, not fully here, since no one feels me. I feel you. You do? I’m lost, too. And hungry? Yes. Then it’s working. I’m getting across. Yes. You’re getting across. Let’s be friends. Sure thing. The emotion crawled up my ass and made itself at home. At first, it felt a little like radar, pulses of electromagnetism pinging off squirrels & crows. Then more like a spinster in a rocking chair spitting tobacco. Then an astronaut putting a foot down on a planet for the first time. And then one morning I felt a stirring of wings in my mouth, and the emotion flew out in a flock of words.

Stradivarius Of Darkness 

I want to be a Stradivarius of darkness. I want to be Agnes Moorhead swatting little astronauts in a Twilight Zone episode. I think of myself as Popeye. But it’s not working. My forearms are still the same size. And I don’t like spinach. However, the poultice does seem to be working. Nihilism is where you end up when you look for the light in someone’s eyes. It’s all about pushing a language into a huge poem waiting to be written. The Portuguese call it saudade, the sadness of an unappeasable longing. We look in the poem and see vowels riding around on consonants persuasive as sugar, and think to ourselves yes, I believe I will pull this poem out of the womb of its creation and see what it can do. So far, nothing. But I can see it breathe, and its eyes open, and something vague and beautiful as Chicago at night causes trains to exist.

Chestnuts, Cherries And A Jukebox Tree 

I live close to a street that had once been lined with chestnut trees, immensities so thick, so old, so lush that the combined effect was that of a tunnel, a shrouded passageway arched by limbs of exuberant foliage. Most of those chestnuts are now gone, victims of environmental stress, the calamitous realities of climate change, drought, abnormally warm temperatures & pest outbreaks. Root rot, sunscald, blight. Gall wasps, gypsy moths, worms. When I first moved to this neighborhood, I was unaware of a ritual that occurred every year beginning in late September and continuing into late October. These were chestnut hunters, most of them elderly, bowed, looking intently at the ground, the street and people’s lawns, stepping on bristly balls of chestnut which, when cooked, taste like roasted buttercup squash. The trick is to stand on the case, one foot on each side, until it splits and the chestnuts pop out. I was unaware of any of this when, going for a run at 5:00 a.m. in the morning when the world is still dark, I encountered groups of people, shadowy figures, completely silent, searching the ground with flashlights. I couldn’t make sense of any of this. I thought I’d run into a scene from a David Lynch movie. I also learned that chestnuts are not always quiet. I would be frequently startled to hear the thud of a chestnut on the roof of a parked car. Oak and cherry trees have been planted to replace the chestnut trees. Each spring, the cherry trees blossom and the effect is one of explosive color, white and pink, until the petals drop to the street in mounds resembling snowdrifts, and the oval shaped leaves replacing them climax in a festival of green. One among them displays an array of bright silvery CD discs, hung on the branches to ward off birds. I call it the Jukebox Tree, and imagine the CDs are by artists like Chuck Berry, Electric Prunes and Tangerine Dream.

John Olson (born August 23, 1947 in Minneapolis, Minnesota) is an American poet and novelist. Olson has lived for many years in Seattle, Washington. He has published nine collections of poetry and three novels, including Souls of Wind, nominated for the 2008 Believer Book Award. In 2004, Seattle’s weekly newspaper, The Stranger, for whom he has written occasional essays, gave Olson one of its annual “genius awards. His writing notebooks have been exhibited at the University of Washington... Olson’s prose poetry has been reviewed in print and online poetry magazines. The poet Philip Lamantia said that Olson was “extraordinary…the greatest prose poetry [i’ve] ever read.” And Clayton Eshleman said “he is writing the most outlandish, strange, and inventive prose poetry ever in the history of the prose poem.”

Three Poems, Michael Begnal

 

Room 14

 

Someone’s in the other room,

the one across the hall,

*having a nervous breakdown*

and also making calls

(to Medea?), trying

to keep themself alive—

 

but in this room,

such gloom has passed,

and there is only

the white fitted mask of years,

the pages amassed,

and that kind of jive—

 

or, there is gloom too

sometimes, or soon: a trip ends,

the next one never begins,

yet the lens or mirror

remains un-cracked in here,

but it warps, slightly, in waves

 

•

 

Someone fumbling with a key,

a metal key, not a card,

in the doorknob lock

 

across the hall—what awaits

inside that other room—

love, a hag, a dagger?

 

I’ll not know, I’ll not

peek out along the brightly

lighted carpeting, the beige

 

walls freshly painted—

no, not fucking with that

now, I got the lean of the lines,

 

and the white-footed hind

dwells in here with me,

in no other room but mine

Entrance

 

The afternoon rhythmed brightness

in what felt to be

must have been Santa Fe,

its old cobblestone lanes,

adobes, its flats

in the colonial-era Spanish style:

 

outside the open portico

entrance of my flat,

families strolling

on the streets,

the hillèd pathways,

in black formal attire

 

 

     —flying in, many-hued,

the hummingbird pair

flits among the rafters,

and the two bats appear,

one getting in my hair

the other down my shirt,

 

disentangled finally,

they perch upon my hands,

peering at me

 

with sapphiric ocean-eyes

 

 

 

 

Light

 

Working with the medium

of light in the body,

waves on wet air

 

my work taken up

in an attuned essay titled

“Sun and Moon and Emptiness”

 

published in an anthology

called Spontaneous Oaks:

Art against Life,

 

by which the editors mean

not “against life” per se

but rather

 

the shit

the system yokes you with

(yes, “the system” is

 

still a serviceable term)—

the essay’s author

remains anonymous, dark

 

 

Michael Begnal is the author of the collections Future Blues (Salmon Poetry, 2012) and Ancestor Worship (Salmon Poetry, 2007), as well as the chapbooks Tropospheric Clouds (Adjunct Press, 2020) and The Muddy Banks (Ghost City Press, 2016). He has also written a critical monograph, The Music and Noise of the Stooges, 1967-71: Lost in the Future (Routledge, 2022). Twitter: @Michael_Begnal  // Web: http://mikebegnal.blogspot.com/

-iota-, Barton Smock

if the poor could keep to themselves, they'd have

superheroes. hey man, hey beast, them aliens

already know what it means to be human.

abduction is the fingerprint of loneliness.

-

what I teach my blood is grow up. I put everything

I had into ruin. watch as my mother becomes

your mother trying to be two people god can use

to carry tug-of-war from a fossil.

-

my dream house is language. you say it to my

face how there are beheadings that have made a

wish. before my son was a giant, he'd

somersault. cigarette in mouth he would.

Barton Smock lives in Columbus, OH, with his wife and four children. Is the author of infant*cinema (Dink Press, 2016) and the editor of isacoustic* (isacoustic.com)