Keep an eye out. We’ll be turning our “Closed” sign to “Open” on Tuesday, September 3.

(Writers new and old are always welcome to contribute. Check out our submissions guidelines.)

The post Welcome back! appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

As the holidays rapidly approach, currently commence, or in some cases, recently close, the graduate students who staff this e-pub are taking some time to write our end of semester papers, grade student work, and share the season with friends and family.

We’ve had a great school year so far, with a series of fantastic contributions. In September, Wil Marple discussed his pedagogical process and the struggles inherent in teaching mastery while still encouraging discovery. October brought us Ray Osborn who addressed timely concerns with powerful language in her poems, including the #MeToo movement, the connections between religion, race, and oppression, and the marginalization of non-neurotypical peoples. Evan Hixon rounded out the year with his November series on the powers of rhetoric in the hands of ill-intentioned leadership and the ways that early modern fears about rumor manifest in our current moment through viral internet stories. If you’ve missed any of these exciting thinkers while they were on tap, you can access their work at any time through their author pages.

We wish you all the best this holiday season, readers. Relax, recharge, and come back hungry to learn again in January!

— Rhyse Curtis, Editor-In-Chief

The post Winter Break appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Click to read Ray’s previous installments.

Human Value

It is the right to crystallize
people you find lacking worth.
You gum your faculties. I am
not as sharp as a diamond and
will not let you shape me

     or carve some eternal chant
     into my soul. My soul is a piece
     of bone, rubbed in sand and dirt.
     Do not use me for entertainment,
     stealing and penetrating my land.

          I am too much for you to exclude.
          I am not from the living light. Yet,
          you wish my presence; you use it
          for non-purpose. I am not human
          to you, a plastic rhinestone discovery

               which you promptly throw away.
               I am not allowed my false death.
               Let you not keep me & let me take
               what you wanted to steal from me,
               that which you never wanted except

                    to erase, me. The minerals are plush
                    with value, treason against whatever
                    luxury you find satisfying, in flouncing
                    my sadness. I skirt your dominion and
                    weighted leverage in act of myself,

                         committal non-commitment to flesh
                         and in Victorian reason. Treasonous.
                         Let my physiology defy choice, is not
                         hyperbolic biology of worlds that end.
                         It is ending. The unknown is not a lie.

                              Resuscitation of mysticism from
                              the simile of self-abnegation. Repeat
                              to me the refrain refracting myself
                              from being anything like your soul-
                              wounded diatribe. I am no diamond.

Material Conclusions

What remains of anatomy
is its disposition to hurt.
I suppose some of us only
talk about what they do not
know. I suppose some of us

     speak in rallying force
     against what they do not know.
     I am clouted with other’s
     memories of the system as
     it was during the war.

          What remains of anatomy
          is its disposition to hurt.
          My body carries the history
          of a system wanting me
          to be non-material. Except

               all scars are material, all
               memory is material, all war
               is material, and Trump is
               material. I decide to make
               my protests material and

                    daub limelight on the fact
                    that all anatomy has the
                    potential to hurt and to
                    hurt is material. Abstractly
                    you can call what can’t be

                         articulated the soul, though
                         eventually you will fill
                         the soul with words, siphon
                         meaning from the words,
                         until you must find another.

Postlapsarian Conclusions

These are my postlapsarian
conclusions: an alcoholic’s
confessional. I wouldn’t be
if I weren’t. But I am, so it
goes. Please flip to page 43.

     If you are still here I warn
     that you will find this trite
     and will probably want to end
     the system at hand. I guess
     that is the point. Don’t pity

          me and my final conclusions
          about society: something worth
          escaping. After my harsh fall
          there was nothing left but to
          choose between an abusive

               relationship, a traitor’s life,
               and spiritual death. It isn’t
               as if I even believe in spirit
               or soul. Perhaps that is now
               something I’ve lost, something

                    God deemed fit to take from
                    me. Do not pity me. You are
                    worth more than that; and so,
                    after my best friend committed
                    suicide, I, too, took a vow

                         of abstinence. Not unlike my
                         vow of celibacy from the year
                         before. There is no rapist
                         involved, this time; but then,
                         are you to say he took from me

                              so as to bring me to the light?
                              Goddamn him and his weak
                              pity. It is him I set myself to
                              break, a spirit so fallen it can
                              only write a diary of negation.

Tritanomalous Conclusions

I don’t see shades of yellow. No
metaphor. My cornea crisp, sunflakes,
made dull from ochreday. It’s late.
I remember being five-years-old.
The blonde girls would correctly

     name the Crayola coloring wax,
     crayons. Sunflower, icterine, ochre,
     saffron, dandelion, naming them
     Loyola, the saints beside themselves
     in scruples, marching from plurality.

          All these silly littles, these sallied ones.
          I shall be yellow carnation, then, said
          one, I shall be gold resin, then, in set
          doublebloom, tang of twin stars slain
          unseeable by my eye. All the same.

               I lack the wit to tell the creatures
               how the wax will melt, how it will
               smell. It is tangy, blooms in mustard
               of the inevitable celestial hamburger.
               The clay, they are all the same.

                    Do I deny that yellow stars exist?
                    I do. Ah! Too bold. Let me again.
                    You’d never know from looking
                    at me that I count myself as them.
                    What is the greatest horror known

                          to humankind? It is the laughter of
                          some ruffled dress, faking, laughing
                          in her own singled-out duress, set.
                          I lost myself in harmony, dance, hues
                         and yellow hues that scrape the eyes.

Ray Osborn [a Creative Writing MFA at Syracuse University] is sick of writing these autobiographies of the soul stuck in hell, for lack of a better word. In general, Ray is interested in not talking about one’s self and, if you must know, Ray’s work focuses on ekphrasis, elegy, and visibility.

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