Her haunting. The body asks how to say no to harm. A cyborg child cannot bear the brunt of clarity. The repellant is ineffective. No child should bear that burden, though we all knew children who did. Factor the software updates, the bugs & the lags, the sensational refractions. Playground dates scheduled on a Wednesday morning. I shudder upon recognizing the agony. My hollow bones, a kiss of your Saturday night bouts with engaged & informed foreplay. Remembering what waves of experience I extract from the puny lives I’ve yet to meet and will never meet. Impunity: a moral language doomed to fail. In my estimate, sounds continue to fall from open mouths. I call them fountains, silent in their sound. The promise is personal improvement. Are lies conducive to raising team morale? The rehearsal continues without the principal dancer. It refines my senses. To insist, “Over and over.”

Catherine Chen is a multidisciplinary poet and performer. They have received fellowships from Theater Mitu, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (Arts Center Residency 2021), Lambda Literary, Poets House, and Franconia Sculpture Park. Their poems appear in The Rumpus, Hyperallergic, Apogee, Nat. Brut, among others. Chen is the author of Beautiful Machine Woman Language (Noemi Press, 2023). They live in Brooklyn.

Kathryn Godoy (they/them) is a 24 year old artist working in Ridgewood, NY. They hold a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts from the Fashion Institute of Technology with a concentration in painting. Kathryn’s work expands upon ideas of memory, transformation, an interest in Jungian psychoanalysis and myth. Presently, Kathryn is exploring the mediums of text and sound. Although Kathryn has created primarily with painting media, the works themselves are more assemblages than paintings. Using color, texture and opacity Kathryn evokes the sense of lush, magnificent, gelatinous psychic landscapes where time slows down but dust still moves. Rendering imagery of stars and celestial bodies Kathryn imbues a renewed spirituality and connection to the world around us here and now.