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So Fucking Beautiful

Jennifer Baumgardner

In 1991, a fat teenaged girl with a prosthetic leg named Nomy Lamm wrote and distributed a xeroxed-and-stapled, passport-sized zine called i’m so fucking beautiful. Part manifesto, part personal essay, it offered a nuanced critique of Fat Is a Feminist Issue, the 1978 self-help best-seller that theorized the psychological and political context around women and eating. That book’s glamorous British author, Susie Orbach, the co-founder of the Women’s Therapy Centre, was therapist to none other

Revlon

Marion Brown

Certainly not the Angel Red I might try, Fire and Ice was my mother’s one and only, flaming her lips and smooching my father’s. Faithful to her favorite shade, she lived her creed of right and wrong. She did not convert to a miniskirt or wear pants, except for hiking, and never applied pink by any name. The click when she capped the sleek cylinder was as distinct as the tap, tap of high heels

‘DIMDUMDIM’

Anne Carson

DAWN IS BRIGHT DUSK IS DIM DOOM IS INBETWEEN You are not asleep. You are a photograph of sleep. You are in a movie of actors acting as if asleep. You are in a movie of actors really sleeping. You may be dreaming of sleep. You may be a person dreaming that he is a person sleeping. You are in a state the locals have convinced you is sleep. This is imitation sleep. Passing itself

‘Tachycardia,’ ‘Tachycardia: Reprise’,’ A Woman’, ‘Ritual in Plague Time’, ‘The Dreaming Woman/The Daughter’

Alicia Ostriker

Tachycardia Tachycardia all day yesterday faint 8 a.m. by evening a fast thud-thud insistent as if someone is trying to tell me something in a language I don’t know the sign language of a being that expresses itself in beats and is becoming impatient with my ignorance we used to understand each other perfectly or so I thought I thought we were like sisters

[Yes, I saw them all, saw them, met some, Richard Hell]

Diane Seuss

Yes, I saw them all, saw them, met some, Richard Hell, Lou Reed, Basquiat, Warhol, Burroughs, Kenneth Koch, and it all left me feeling invisible or fucked, fucked sideways, fucked by a john who stiffs you on your fee and doesn’t leave a tip, it wasn . . . Subscriber Access Required This article is available to paid subscribers with digital access. Already a subscriber with digital access? Log in here to read the full

Matriarchive: What do we inherit from our feminist mothers, and when does their legacy become meaningful?

Jennifer Baumgardner

Ellen Willis with typewriter, giant headphones, and bag from Eli Zabar WHEN I LEFT Ms. magazine in 1997, one of the first people I called for advice was Ellen Willis. I was having an identity crisis. Ms., which had been my way into New York and journalism, was a dream job for five years, a place where editorial meetings entailed discussing the butch-femme dichotomy of Tonya Harding vs. Nancy Kerrigan, where even working the reception

Trending Anxiety Dreams

Rebecca Saltzman

The ghost of crypto futures Your Facebook posts from 2010 reappear for everyone to see A cursed mirror that pitches you MLM products Mitch McConnell All the phone calls you’ve been putting off The bras you stopped wearing during the pandemic are coming for revenge

Three Poems by Joy Ladin

Joy Ladin

Four Seasons 2020-2021 Three owls hoot and answer the last full moon of a year of love and terror. * Heavy spring rain. No matter who wraps them, my mother’s legs keep weeping. * For the first time this summer, I’m not wrong when I hear the sound of water. * Wind in the branches, someone’s mother calling, someone else’s childhood skipping from yard to yard. Disability Time to get used to wearing mortality

‘Dead at Last’, ‘Nirvana’, and ‘Phone Call’

Linda Bamber

Dead at Last Dead at last! Dead at last! Now I can see the world as it is floating indifferent like the gull from the hospital window white with black wingtips feeling the currents of air guiding its flight. Perfectly free from compassion for me. Nirvana I can’t find the can opener and then I do. The electrician shows me my name on his forearm “Linda” in pink magic marker which is how he remembers

‘From The Museum of Mary’

Mary Jo Bang

The Announcement A bird came to see me once, a talking magpie that said, This will happen— and I didn’t so much agree as think, why me? It was arbitrary, as far as I could see. Ordinary—being at hand and being asked to do whatever needs doing. Steadfast as a tattoo that can’t be washed off. A castle that isn’t mine reminds me that this was not my idea, especially considering how inevitable death is,

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