Click cover to download ROOM 2.24 or previous issues

Essays Illustration by Bibadash /Shutterstock.com | Edited by Mafe Izaguirre

REMAINING TO BE SEEN by Umi Chong

It is Tuesday at 4:00 pm, and it is time for Ben, a white man in his early thirties. He often refers to himself as “strange” for feeling out of step in not holding popular, mainstream views like most of…

Read more
Essays Red Frame by Mafe Izaguirre

REFRAMED by Celeste Kelly

“I was thinking to myself, I can’t wait to tell them. They’re going to be so excited!” Or maybe the patient didn’t say excited—maybe they used a different word. I can’t exactly remember because my mind got stuck on them/they’re.…

Read more
Essays Illustrations by Bibadash /Shutterstock.com

MOVING BOUNDARIES by Dinah M. Mendes

Many of us have had the experience of standing in front of the window of a hospital’s newborn nursery, a partition that simultaneously protects and allows visitors to gaze at the variety of human life displayed within. The tiny creatures,…

Read more
Poems Illustration by Ichpochmak /Shutterstock.com | Edited by Mafe Izaguirre

LIKE LIVING IN AN EPILOGUE by Linda Hillringhouse

Linda Hillringhouse holds an MFA from Columbia University. She was a first-place winner of the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award (2014), a second-place winner of Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry (2012), and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize (2020). Her…

Read more
Essays Illustrations by Evgeny Turaev and Jorm S /Shutterstock.com | Edited by Mafe Izaguirre

BEAR WITH ME by Mark Singer

Even though a virus is blind, we have learned, yet again, that like so many oppressive things, it disproportionately finds its way to those who are already suffering. I feel privileged that, during the coronavirus pandemic

Read more
Reviews IP Books

BOOK REVIEW by Richard Grose

On The Pleasures of Owning Persons: The Hidden Face of American Slavery by Volney Gay. On the Pleasures of Owning Persons by Volney Gay (IP Books, 2016) is a book written for white Americans. The author is a professor in…

Read more
Letters Illustration by Kursat Unsal /Shutterstock.com

LETTER FROM BRAZIL

I started my psychoanalytic learning and political activism in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It was the spring of 1981, a time of turmoil and search for personal and collective freedom. I migrated from Brazil to the United…

Read more
Editorials ROOM 2.21 Cover

JUST SAYIN’ by Hattie Myers

“Radical openness does not mean that we empty our minds but that we open our minds to the prospect of losing the understandings to which we are attached.” So begins An Interview with Anton Hart. To be fair, though, perhaps…

Read more
Poems Artwork by MaLija /Shutterstock.com

2020 VISION by Gail Griffin

Gail Griffin is the author of four books of nonfiction, most recently Grief’s Country: A Memoir in Pieces, named a Michigan Notable Book, and “The Events of October:” Murder-Suicide on a Small Campus. Her essays, poems, and flash nonfiction have…

Read more
Essays Artwork by Pradeep_kmpk14 /Shutterstock.com

MOTORCYCLE MAN by Christie Platt

Back in 1987, I was in a doctoral psychology program outside of Los Angeles. I had the good fortune to do my final internship in a solidly middle-class section of town at a community mental health center staffed with social…

Read more
Art © Gjertrud Hals

THE NET by Gjertrud Hals

I was born in 1948, on Finnøy, an island with two hundred inhabitants. My family was living close to the factory where my father and grandfather were mechanics, making and installing engines for the fishing boats. During my childhood, there…

Read more
Essays Artwork by Leighann Blackwood

WHOSE HAIR IS IT? by Raynell Sangster

Within the Black community, there exists a hidden caste system of “good” and “bad” hair, just like skin color hierarchies. “Good” hair is considered to be closer to straighter, wavier, Eurocentric hair, and “bad” hair is kinkier, coiled, thicker hair.…

Read more
Essays Artwork by Mikk Tonissoo /Shutterstock.com

WHISPERING WINDS by Pamela Nathan

In the early 1980s, the heyday of Land Rights, I lived in Central Australia, working as a sociologist with the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress. A senior Aboriginal man, Dick Lechleitner Japanangka, worked alongside me, and we visited many Aboriginal communities…

Read more
Poems Artwork by Jack B

SMOKE by Kelly Cressio-Moeller

Kelly Cressio-Moeller is a poet and visual artist. Her poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Gargoyle, Guesthouse, North American Review, Poet Lore, Radar Poetry, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, THRUSH Poetry Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Water~Stone Review, and ZYZZYVA among…

Read more
Essays Artwork by Andrius Repsys /Shutterstock.com

THINGS WHICH DON’T EXIST by Kyrie Mason

Another fixation of mine has been the impossibility of my ancestors, particularly the abducted and the enslaved. Through the wound which would be called the Atlantic Slave Trade, Black persons were simultaneously the subject, the object, and the labor. Put…

Read more
Essays Artwork by Jorm S./Shutterstock.com

GAGGED BY GOLDWATER by Bandy X. Lee

As I write this at the turn of the year, hospitals are overflowing, and our medical system is about to collapse. Yet the approaching loss of a half million lives in the United States from COVID-19 was entirely preventable. For…

Read more