I know the dopamine hit of buying something pretty makes you truly believe that this will be the magical item that changes everything, but sweetie please put your phone down and drink a glass of water. Don’t fall into the trap.

You were always waiting for that piece, that final slice of inspiration that would finish the story you claimed would change the world. But the inspiration never came, and your story sat in your notebook, unattended, like a corpse in a coffin.

In learning the history of the “afterlives” of public women, I have come to fear my own death. I fear the manipulation of my corpse as a means to end Womanhood. I fear that people will champion their desires and use my body to achieve them after my death, and fear that they do it now, while I am still breathing.

As I write this, there’s a gas shortage in North Carolina. Maybe you’ve heard about it. A pipeline hack led to panic buying and hoarding. Tonight, someone tweeted that 78% of gas stations in North Carolina are out of gas, the worst of any state right now.

The ambient fear of my grandmother’s inevitable death hung over me like deep summer humidity. I knew from a young age how precious our time together was, how fraught the timeline, how scarce the memories would someday be. And all these years later, I still grasp at silhouettes of that summer and they slip through my fingers like rain.

Whenever students get too close to me, I flinch. We leave the doors open for airflow because of COVID and I think of my training for active shooters, but you notice there’s no such thing as an inactive shooter?

I thought if I could just pull up these weeds my garden would be perfect. My garden is a patio courtyard, a circle of tiles holding a glass-top table, framed with a square of flagstones, and between the cracks there are ants, woodlice, the occasional worm, and weeds.

We eloped. The pandemic helped me justify the wedding I wanted.

Boshemia designer and contributor Lauren Elizabeth, who lived in France for close to seven years, reacts to Emily in Paris.

I’m uncomfortable with how Appalachian identity works in the media and in academia, both because I think it’s a problematic identity that I hold too dearly and because I think I’m faking it.

Scientists can talk to me about lumens and refractions, about reflections and lightwaves, and I won’t understand any of it, no matter how much you try, but I think I can say something about the night sky, if you give me a chance. Shouldn’t a poet do it?

Boshemia designer and contributor Lauren Elizabeth reckons with America on the 4th of July in the wake of personal and collective loss.

Lana Del Rey citing herself as glamorous, fragile and delicate while othering women of colour as “strong,” goes hand in hand with a long tradition of viewing white women as glamourous and women of colour as exotic

At the beginning of tiptoeing through a collapsing, ghost town, society, I was both ashamed and confused by the immediate relief and freedom I felt as soon as lockdown peaked. How could I ever admit that within waves of death, I had become alive?

When did you know you[r professors] were queer?

I want to believe there's consolation in reminiscence, that mourning can be cleansing when it's set against green and red lights and holiday songs and a sense of impending renewal. But when time never moves forward for us, it can never be properly marked and peacefully released. Instead we are the ones marked. Holidays repeat endlessly.

Can any of us eat intuitively in a society in which nothing about a woman’s natural body is respected, honored, or trusted?

I come from a large British family, and while I cannot say that the idea of family bonds is not important, it is often with a focus on independence from each other, rather than connecting as a unit. A little over two years ago I made the decision to move to Australia to be with my partner. The experience has certainly cracked open my own perceptions of family and the anchors we need in life to feel connected.

Queering the classroom can be nothing more or less than an act of existence that does not necessitate a certain mode, reaction, or action toward or against a gender presentation binary, or an understood queer normativity.

After the Queer Big Bang in Appalachia, still we must ask the question: where can we all pee?