These stories and poems [in Terror House Magazine] mean exactly what they depict: the darkness and violence, desecration, addiction, and afflictions of late capitalism. They offer no analysis or interpretation, which renders the litany of horrors utterly meaningless. There are no hermeneutics or erotics; they offer nothing to see, touch, or feel, consigning the website to the red-pilled universe of suffering.
When I was younger, I attributed great size to important places. My grandparents’ condo, for example, was a labyrinth of rooms and towering ceilings. My cousins and I raced through the dark hallways like they were the Catacombs of Paris—stretching for miles, buffering the sound of our sprints and collisions with their sheer enormity.
While lawmakers got to tout their participation in making these murals as a win for BLM, the movement had really been asking for concrete policy change that put BLM’s demands into law.
One may argue that the Orient and the Occident neither are nor can become the things they represent, since language is always prone to being representative. This exercise regarding paintings under the light of language and representation may alert the need to change our constructed way of understanding the Occident and the Orient.
There was a tree I liked to climb in the backyard of my childhood home. “Liked to climb,” I should say, are someone else’s words. I don’t know when they became my own, but some time between then and now I adopted the words in agreement that climbing that tree was something I liked to do and did often.
Last March, the highest caliber athletes around the world were forced to put their dreams on hold. The 2020 Olympics in Tokyo could not have taken place in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the official announcement still arrived as a shock to the thousands of athletes vying for the chance to represent their countries and prove themselves on the world stage.
On a college campus like Yale, visible declarations of people’s political affiliations are practically ubiquitous. Laptop stickers, Zoom backgrounds, backpack pins, and the like are plastered everywhere, announcing to the world what is right, what needs change, and who is fit to make that change.
Hill reaches into the depths of her soul to express emotions so richly human that her grief, and pain, and joy, are ours.
