Saumya Arya Haas is an ALB candidate in Religious Studies at Harvard University. She lives with challenges due to a Traumatic Brain Injury. Prior to this life-altering injury, she engaged in interfaith/intergroup dialogue and Social Justice projects, advising organizations such as and , and has worked with the Parliament of World Religions, The UN World Council of Religious Leaders, and The UN Peace Initiative. Her work has taken her everywhere from West Africa to the White House. She is a regular contributor at , , and . Her writing can also be found on various other websites and in print media. Saumya is a priestess of both Hinduism and Vodou. Fox: Thanks so much for coming to talk with us about your love of art and your writing life. I know you’ve published a lot of writing — on religion, on culture, and journalistic pieces — but you mentioned to [...]

Bangles Sometimes they annoy me and I say I’m going to take them off for good. I remember the night when the bangle-seller eased them on: Bright and clattering, red and gold, spangly with glitter. For weeks afterwards, small shimmers appear On my clothes, my face, my husband’s blonde hair. The gentle glitterbomb of Love and India. I remember my regular bangle-seller, Rotund and genial, Telling me (I was 14) that if a man ever grabs me And I cannot get away, To slam my wrist against his eyes. This surprises me: They are glass, these bangles, decorative and fragile-seeming Pretty, useless. But he tells me that adornment never only serves one purpose. These shining rings are blinding In more than one way. One at a time, they are delicate things. I wear 30 on each arm. And when a man grabs me and I cannot get away I smash [...]

PIER AT CANNES seen at a film (fish) marketacross the bay, a string of lights never thought she’d find herself in an Antonioni film yet here she is and so is he— mere witnesses to an abstraction the dark sea and dark sky meet somewhere _________________she thinks, _____directing herself to find a gesture as apt as this moment he stares back in irreflection The sea and sky may kiss at the horizon Why not we? _____________She turns a cartwheel instead _____________to approach him and yet remain distant absurdity strikes at the very heart of the proposition What a child, an American! He is of course a French polygamist with several children by several wives in farmhouses scattered about the French countryside so fated to act out two wholly different scripts, he says _____________Un écrivain a dit… _____________[A writer once said] là où toutes les eaux se mèlent, là où il [...]

Click image to order School for the Blind at Amazon.com. School of the Blind. Daniel Simpson. Poets Wear Prada, 2014. 31 pages, ISBN: 978-0692284575 Homer and Milton were blind poets but one doesn’t think of them as blind poets, only as poets. And that is what Daniel Simpson is: simply a good poet. He also happens to be blind. School for the Blind is his first collection, and, yes, it centers on his life growing up blind. The reality is that we are all blind in some way and that is what surfaces in these poems, not simply physical blindness but a failure to see, to notice the reality of others, even to notice what we reveal about ourselves. . . . in conversation, I try to act undivided while, in fact, I’m on alert for any glitch in composure, any revelation of an actor playing a part. It’s often [...]

Faux King in the Parking Lot It was in the parking lot at the Samba Club between sets at the Huxley wedding and he was an Elvis impersonator. We’d eyed each other during “Love Me Tender” through his heavy lashes he nodded me over. Ah, to be taken without being adored. Though to be adored without being taken is also a wonder. Those silver studs on his white suit. The Brylcreem (I didn’t know they still made it) left oil stains, dammit, on my nice linen skirt. Techno boinked from a passing car and we pumped to it. He said his wife didn’t understand him. “I never sleep with happily married men,” I told him. Curling his lip, the faux king shot “Then you ought to sleep with your husband.” I should have slapped him. But his thighs were hot and the side of the car was cold. From Miss [...]

Datura suaveolens If there were flowers on the moon they’d look like this, droopy and luminous, butter-colored, fading down to white, I’m thinking, swinging my bare feet, sipping at some moon-hued wine from the lunar landscape of Sardegna, just as he asks me if I know they’re often called “moon- flowers.” I did not know that, but I’m not surprised that he does, nor that he’s read my poem-thoughts again. I do know, though, that this blowsy flower’s parts are hallucinogenic as all get out, something that Rappaccini would have been proud to bring into existence were he in that business rather than that of breeding a toxic daughter, beautiful but unlovable. And just then I remember how we went for a walk through the park behind Domus Aurea one day and I was angry because he hadn’t listened (or maybe hadn’t heard) and we passed the Datura in full [...]

For a poet who confesses to having more subscriptions to science magazines than literary ones, it’s not surprising to find something like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle couched in the closing of a poem such as “Your Way,” you get just one thing or the other— where the water came from, or the water. What is surprising and gratifying is that James Richardson’s poetry is not merely clever. It is also tender. Not necessarily in the way that Bishop’s “The Shampoo” is tender. It is not so much intimacy but a glimpse into the grander scale of things that puts our smallness into perspective, that kind of perspective science usually gives through its comprehension of vast spaces and terribly long intervals of time. It’s a perspective that permits a compassion for the fragility of our place in the scheme of things. From it, we see into the isolation of our humanity, the [...]

The Downside of Superpowers Invisibility makes you aloof, brute super strength makes you an easy mark for anyone with trucks to haul, no spark of gratitude from them. The truth? Your gift is only special if there’s proof and ordinary mortals want your work to entertain them day and night, til dark, your life a kind of superpower spoof where all you do is turn them on with speed or x-ray sight or teleported flesh, the way you walk through walls or dash through time. Does anybody care about your needs, grant you vacation days, an empty beach? No wonder apathy’s become your crime. _________________________________________________________________________ Allison Joseph lives, writes and teaches in Carbondale, Illinois, where’s she’s part of the creative writing faculty at Southern Illinois University. Her latest books are _My Father’s Kites_ (Steel Toe Press) and _Trace Particles_(Backbone Press).

Photo credit: Ronda Broatch Bio: Natasha Kochicheril Moni is a writer and a naturopathic medical student. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews have been published in journals including Verse, Fourteen Hills, Indiana Review, and DIAGRAM. Natasha’s first poetry collection,The Cardiologist’s Daughter, was released by Two Sylvias Press in late 2014. More of her work and musings may be found at

what we treat it as a hill so big it switches color when clouds push armadillo red ember echo picnic I dodder and I stray in crayfish streams a man carrying a dirigible defense the one we hand around is full final and stifling, like a love or re-entry the glove of Earth and staying seasonly horse albatross table cloth sky glass home pinball machine visitation inertia, bear pawing at trash acclimating puff of fog, flash, resembler’s ring string overflow feather piano and penny our horses wander and field a man carrying dirigibles over, a hero as much as Kenny Rogers cries on an airplane, about the alone I ride trolley, trains and sky ferry bus on a hollow rocket, I head forward by propulsion to hold you as a soft packed strawberry our love left, like a napkin on catered table an embrace drawing of a yet to be [...]

The Infoxicated Corner and its regulars love few things in life more than a good arts party (a good arts party, I said). For this reason, I wanted to let all my nearest & dearest Northeastern friends know (if they didn’t already) about the really fun time that’s about to go down in Pittsburgh, PA, this January 31st. Filmmaker Rachael Deacon and Poet-Editrix Margaret Bashaar have created an annual event, titled FREE _____ POEMS ABOUT _____. What fills in those blanks changes every year: last year’s event was FREE SNAKE POEMS ABOUT SNAKES, and this year’s is FREE MONSTER POEMS ABOUT MONSTERS. Here’s what makes it cool: it’s a party for the people. Really. It’s a completely DIY, no-budget event. When they say it’s free, they mean just that. Performers, writers, artists, and other vendors contribute time and work in order to create a festive gathering that brings together artists [...]

And Now You Want Me One More Time Your mother told me you were out with the stars. I tried to call but you left your phone on the counter. I went outside. The sun was up. I called your name to the sky. I couldn’t see anything but blue. I called out your name until it was dark. Above an audience of diamonds all laughed at me. They laughed until I lost my voice. Then they sent clouds to fill my cup with water. I found a new boyfriend. He approached me while I watched birds pluck worms out of a rainy field. I asked him why the birds were able to find worms as soon as they landed. He said worms float on water. Then he kissed me. I felt like a worm. The Open Eyed Dream Meets The Day Moon There are people who look like my [...]

Author photo courtesy of Matthew Wyndham Jellyfish There’s no doubt she thinks he’s lost at sea. A smudge of blood on her glasses. She looks healthy. She wishes he looked healthy. Her weird stare drifts across his sick face like the shadow of a murder weapon they called love. Her new boyfriend is a taxi driver. He is a quiet man with at least one tooth missing, so obviously he’s a paedophile. When their little girl says the new boyfriend’s name her father’s fingertips go numb; he has visions of the taxi driver’s dismembered corpse scattered on a cold beach full of baby jellyfish, broken phones, the nights he dies without her. They share a joint in his parents’ garden, negotiating a future that bites too hard. Her saliva moist on the filter, he takes the cigarette, inhales, wonders if this is the last time her spit will touch his [...]

A Labor and a Language of Love (or, What Are You Gonna Do with that Humanities PhD?) Once upon a time, before I was a nurse and a student midwife, I went to graduate school with a very different goal in mind: a PhD in English. Fresh out of undergrad, with vague ideas about feminism and about changing the world, a love of books, and precious few ideas about what I could do with my degree, I left the city in which I’d spent my entire life and moved to California to become an academic. Many things changed while I was in grad school– I met new people and lost touch with others, I got married, I had two daughters– but others remained the same– I still considered myself a book-loving feminist, and I still wanted to change the world. And by the time I was in the dissertation phase, [...]

It’s the very last day of 2014, and I wanted to post one more installment of TheThe Infoxicated Corner before we take off a few (more) weeks, and I catch y’all again a bit later into the New Year. I can’t believe Infoxicated went live at the beginning of September: the past few months have flown by, and yet I have the feeling that we’ve gone some crazy places together through all the absolutely stunning contributions people have shared with us. I feel very blessed to have brought y’all this amazing stuff, and really grateful to the other TheThe crew, who invited me and and gave me my own little corner. (How sad would it be if I didn’t have this platform, and this embarrassment of aesthetic/creative riches had been kept to my quiet little niche of SoCal?) And I’m really pleased — no, I think a better word might [...]