Tender is the Flesh: An Exploration of Exploitation

**CW: cannibalism, SA, animal cruelty, gore, pregnancy/childbirth, child loss, abuse** “He doesn’t call it special meat. He uses technical words to refer to what is a human but will never be a person, to what is always a product.” What is the value of a human being? That is the question Argentinian author, Agustina Bazterrica,

Returning Revitalized

Looking Ahead to Serpentine Vol. 3 “Season of / joy for the bee. The green will never / again be so green, so purely and lushly/ new, grass lifting its wheaty seedheads / into the wind.” – from “More Than Enough” by Marge Piercy It’s good to be back! Serpentine is coming out of hibernation

Writer Spotlight: Melanie Hyo-In Han Sandpaper Tongue, Parchment Lips

One of the wonderful things about the literary scene is that these pockets of creatives form where we all get to come across each others’ work time and time again. To be honest, I think I can trace most of the connections I’ve made back to a single professor from college who keeps launching his

Searching for Signal: How to Get Published in Our Journal

So, you want to get published in a literary magazine. Good on you for putting yourself out there! Seriously. When we go through submissions, we keep in mind that there’s a creative soul out there who might’ve stared at that “send” button anxiously for a minute or two before wiping the sweat off their palms,

Book Review: Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall

Check out the book Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall!

Why are Some Women Shaving Their Heads in Lock-down?: How Isolation is Impacting Gender and Gender Performance

How quarantine is affecting gender expression and identity in young women and what it might have to do with a TikTok trend.

Book Review: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

In her novel Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi masterfully weaves together the stories of seven generations of one family impacted by the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The Function of Art as Protest

Auden, in all his turbulent wisdom, once told us that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Gasp, I know. But, he’s not alone here. Oscar Wilde tells us that “All art is quite useless,” in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. So does that make the term “protest art” an oxymoron? Obviously, we’re a literary zine

The Big Bad in Macbeth: Why I want Lady Macbeth to be an Anti-Hero

by Ammielle Charles Tor.com’s Elise Ringo wrote a compelling argument in her article “Villainesses Required: Why the Dark Side Needs More Women”. Even though she acknowledged female villains that already exist in pop culture, she argued that female villains “are bound by the stereotypical limitations of their gender.” Even though “some female villains…break the mold,”

Why Another Lit Journal?

Thanks to the rise of the online journal, the literary world has been flooded with thousands and thousands of new publications ranging from every topic and style imaginable. The print ones move to online or shut down, and no one reads them unless they’re trying to submit something- which is generous, considering plenty of submitting