Fragmented at Best
It is a strange day when Classics Twitter unites. Yes, you read that correctly: a subsection of the notoriously polemical app is given to the study of the Ancient World, dedicated to joking about the tragedians and assessing the new Pericles reference à la Johnson. What Classics Twitter does best,
Amen
Amen tastes like church cookies: crumbly, stale, hauled out of cardboard boxes, old man’s fingers with popping blue veins beat her to the chocolate ones. She is always surprised when she remembers Sundays in this golden haze, edged in maroon, the smell of mahogany – She breaks off the memory li
Charoset
not ch like chocolate / the kind of ch that gets stuck in the back of the throat & stops you from crying / the kind you throw together once a year / but like the moon it never sets / and stays behind & washes up / i wonder how many miles per hour […]
Iphigenia in Jaywick / The Aftermath
I grew up under stained-glass windows, learnt their blues and pomegranate-reds before my mouth figured out how to form words – I was never good with names, but the faces stuck. One stood looking over the pew our family always sat in, Eve and Adam, her hair the same russet-gold as the apple she hel
My grandmother’s hands
In a fading photograph, they sit一双手Newly-wed still. They pause,hovering in a chant of numbers wavering into silence, and words slipout of reach 一粒, 两粒, 渐渐溜走like grains of rice through parted fingersuntil cupped hands left almost barrenwait only to receive a voice: it
In a Taxi
Dong-gu is trying to keep his face shielded by the overhead mirror, but the bright light keeps hitting his eyes. He squints, accentuating the wrinkles that begin in the corners and sprawl across his face like route lines on maps, and his view is momentarily dimmed. He opens them wide again to watch
Hiding in Plain Sight: Oxford’s accessible accommodation problem
Step through the grand doors of any college at the start of the academic year, and excited freshers dressed in branded shirts will be strewn across the quad. Chatting about “‘formals”’, “‘hall”’, and “‘matriculation,”’ they familiarise themselves with the Oxford jargon, slowl
Think of the Children
“The mechanisms of moral panic…lead to the emergence of an imaginary solution – in tougher laws, moral isolation, a symbolic court action…its victims left to endure the new proscriptions, social climate and legal penalties.” Jeffrey Weeks, 1985 Those who have transgender peo
how men spend lifetimes
How men spent lifetimes building hotels and never saw them finished. To lie by the pool on an oppressive summer’s day and never see it finished, to drift away. Nothing shines like your reflection. I was so angry at you I hit the water, broke the sun into so many sparkling days. I have been [&hel