In Joan Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” she writes “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.” Such simple words, but the personal essay is an intimate form, full of reflection and creative misremembering, or as Didion calls it, when note...
Politics, religion, and science fiction are an ambitious mix in Gila Green’s first novel; her version of the near future affirms that religion-based misogyny is alive and thriving, as is technology: robot child-minders and glitchy mind-reading cell phones serve as...
Amber Dawn’s second book, sections of which were first published in Room (30:2; 35:4), is a mixed-genre work chronicling the author’s experience in the sex industry and her experience of poetry as a life-changing force. The book attempts to de-stigmatize sex-work,...
My mom loves us, loves to make us beautiful, make my sister and me into one girl— a pageant of Persia. “Murder me if this is all it takes to make me beautiful” —Iranian proverb, only used by women My mom loves us, loves to make us beautiful, make my sister and me into...
My husband wants to know why the line is always broken. I say the poem is made of words, but the words are not the poem. The words are the way in. The broken lines are openings. I remember how his skin turned gold under a streetlight the first time he took off his...
We polish our big bellies with creams, we henna Eden vines on them, we Buddha rub them, as do strangers, for wealth. In birth class they tell us your body was made for this. They tell us your mothers were strapped down and drugged. We are capable of doing so...
I learned how to pick locks in prison. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon; the adults were drunk and some had paired off to have sex in tents pitched on the lawn. I was sitting on the scratched wooden pew of a picnic table, playing backgammon by myself. I shuffled the...
I hide my power in a cloak I hoard as anger. My jaw gears like a charging bull; hairs horn from my butting forehead. “sky. There is no edge from which to hang my plumb-line. No ledge on which to lay my spirit-level. And you are outside piling logs, working on your own...
Manolo called it the Everybody Laughs Scam, but as I approached the couple on the bench I found that prospect hard to imagine. The woman looked teary-eyed and the man had the strap of his camera bag wrapped three times around his fist. Manolo called it the Everybody...
Room would like to apologize to Yoko's Dogs for the formatting errors made in "Yellow" in issue 36.2. Room would like to apologize to Yoko's Dogs for the formatting errors made in "Yellow" in issue 36.2. Yellow I her cardinals return from the west printed on napkins...
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ROOM 49.3 NO CANADA
In the new era of CanCon, as feminists and writers it is our task to reject this Canadian exceptionalism, this too-comfortable back-patting. How can we begin to imagine alternative arts economies, Indigenous economies around art, that start with treaty, that align with BDS? What art, what literature, would such a system free us to create?
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ROOM 49.2 Science
Welcome to the Science issue of Room Magazine, where we privilege questions: questions about how to construct better worlds; questions about how to destroy hyper-capitalistic, necropolitical systems; questions that beget questions and new questions.
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