Quarantitty
Homepage by Krowarts
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An Ode 2 Myself - Yoko Please
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untitled - dawrlin mejia
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Reef - Daniel Armitano
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Untitled - Kimberly Celeste
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untitled - dawrlin mejia
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Queen of Hearts - John Beltre
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All This Ethnicity - Kendall Cafaro
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Untitled - Cyn
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Untitled - Mark G
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There are dreams here - Krowarts
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Consent Fucking Matters - Kimberly Celeste
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Abajo la misma luna - Shakira Mejia
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Reflections on Madonna - Laura Hetherington
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Lazy Day - Carol Jeong
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untitled - dawrlin mejia
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My monthly is your lifeline - Kimberly Celeste
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Tripod Bowl - Daniel Armitano
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There are dreams here - Krowarts
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His Father's Castle, His Mother's Glory - Matt Scheffler
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I am the Dog called Forbidden - SWAINEB
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FiveHold - Jeff Brain
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Nails - Nails by Val
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Nobody Tells Me! - Maddy Baker
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Tripod Bowl - Daniel Armitano
Music by Young~Based~Josh
Photo by @evaweinberg
1. flowers
2. saturn
Reef
Queen of Hearts
An excerpt from a work in process,
All This Ethnicity
7th Grade Social Studies Teacher
So...what is your ethnicity Kendall? I can’t quite tell.
7th Grade Me
Oh, My dad’s like Japanese and Italian and my mom’s just English…I think.
7th Grade Social Studies Teacher
Japanese? Wow.
7th Grade Me
...
My Voice
(we see moving images of the doll, the kimono from different angles)
I noticed confusion at Japanese
Often, I’d notice confusion at Japanese.
In my grandparent’s bedroom there lived this doll, in a glass case
The doll was dressed in full Kimono
White face, Red Painted Lip
She stood posing
Left hand on right cheek
Looking down on the ground with a kind of smirk
I always noticed confusion at Japanese
Often, in me
Where was the quarter of myself that was Japanese?
Toes, feet, ankles, shins, thighs, hip, torso, breasts, arms, fingers
What about in my...
Neck, head, eyebrows, forehead, hair
From there I search
For a story
For a person
.
.
My Grandma Kay taught me how to knit and sew. I remember a weekend where we went to Joanne fabrics and she bought me my first sewing kit and a tomato pin cushion. The TOMAAAHTO. She’d call it.
She had her own vegetable garden filled with tomaaaahtos and cucumbers.
Her order at Japanese restaurants was green tea and Chirashi. She also loved anything Tempura
She loved pocketbooks and jewelry and things that were made really well.
She’d scoff at me for throwing away scraps that I’d cut away from vegetables
She couldn’t understand, was confounded when I would run around with wet hair or not wear socks or when I asked
“can you teach me how to crochet?”
“waste of yarn” she responded without a flinch
She wrapped the yarn around her fingers in a way so that she could press her index finger down like a button and her fingers would become an actual knitting machine
She had long nails, manicured, usually with red nail polish.
Grandma Kay rocked a red lip.
Her suits were gorgeous.
when she’d sleep over she’d pop out her dentures and tell me that’s what happens when you don’t brush your teeth
I’d tell her something that made total sense to me and she’d go “Whaaaa???”
I started taking Japanese in high school. I was terrible at it.
She'd began to decline. She began forgetting things that just happened or things we just said.
I’d show her my sentences in attempted hiragana and she may have been losing memory but she knew that I could NOT speak Japanese.
She came to all my shows. She came to the soccer games. The occasional karate tournament.
My friends knew her as my Japanese Grandma.
My Grandma Kay.
There are dreams here
Consent Fucking Matters
Abajo la misma luna
Reflections on Madonna
1.
Zephyr in the sky at night
A place I could possibly call home
If the water pressure was right
And someone could prove I’m safe there
If I close my eyes I’m with you anyway
Dancing in your shadow
Like the child I was at seventeen
Hoping to go somewhere with you
Once you drove me in your big white car
After you’d taken a tab
And told me you were the car
Staring straight down at the road
I wasn’t scared
With my parents’ beer sweating in my pocket
I was ready to go somewhere with you.
2.
People change
People change
But summer comes around
I remember you
I know we died
But summer comes around
There was a time when summer made me think of you
Sweat color
Drives out of the city in your car
I could see you were the beach I hadn’t visited in years
At night I lock the doors
Where no one else can see
Lie on the ground
Touch the knuckle you held
Same one I burned on the light
Did you know in seven years we will hate each other?
Did you know we’ll think of each other
When the 1 goes by
And we’ll die that way
Separate, thinking of each other
I’ll leave money for your children
And you for mine
Maybe my daughter will love someone someday
With sunny eyes like yours
When she’s grown and hungry for the things life can’t give freely
The things you have to pay a price for.
Girl with the great name
It might as well be you
Curly bangs in your face, some sort of jewel-toned lumpy sweater
A dream girl designed by the dream
I wonder if you were born this way
Or made yourself
Brick by brick
Like I did
Wonder when you go home if you feel empty at night
Wonder if you built the walls before the floor
When you go home to the Northeast
And drink tea in the woods
Do you twinge from leftover pain?
Or are you truly happy
Do you get wrapped up in warm conversations
In dim lighting at night
With your intelligent parents
Or do you shuffle around a cold house,
uncomfortable?
Do you find yourself out of place again
Search for what to say to your own blood
Feel thirsty for the city but also torn between
there, and what you used to be,
creeping up your back?
Are you really as soft brown as you look
Boots just out of frame
Some girl that’s kinda wonderful
Who I danced with on a snow day
Woman
I’m a brave woman
Coming down here among all these men
To make my way to market
To hold my bags and stand stoned among them
Alone. Like I can handle it.
I’m a brave woman
I’m not afraid of them in my skirt
I size them up. They see me see them.
I do not look away.
I stand among them. I am one of the men.
As I make my way to the market alone
I am a modern woman
With just conditional fear
I don’t care about fairness
I’ll stand right here
Lazy Day
My monthly is your lifeline
Tripod Bowl Doodle
Flower Arrangement by @fleurotica
There are dreams here
His Father's Castle, His Mother's Glory
“His Father’s Castle, His Mother’s Glory” is a series of photos dedicated to my father who lost both his parents in the past year and a half. On a recent trip to his childhood home, I watched my father contend with decades of unresolved trauma and neglect from his own father, himself a survivor of abuse. Perhaps revisiting his parent’s vacant home was a final way for my dad to reconcile years of rage and pain with the love, tenderness, and forgiveness he has learned to give himself.