The Art of #DownWithWilly: Calling Out Rice’s Racism and Building Towards a Better Future
by Sarah “Students at the sit-ins aren’t just calling for change, they are creating it. Even as the statue still stands, the movement for racial justice on campus grows, and it will continue to grow louder until real, tangible efforts are made by the administration that go beyond the creation of another anti-racist focus group.”
four poems
by Keagan Wheat “I had been thinking about my fading memory of dinosaurs, my fading desire to prove a boyhood by standards I disregard.”
Ashes In My Mouth
by Jazzib Akhtar “There’s a harshness to the blue mist I’m smoking. It’s a familiar sting that lingers like unhealed scars.”
Fresher Fields Than Houston: Wilfred Owen, Z-Ro and the Apocalypse of Imperialism
by M.C. Zendejas “One must wonder, however, whether this complicity characterizes imperialism as unchangeable, or merely recognizes that immediate change is impossible, that change is not a single event but a historical process. After all, if we are to dare to invent tomorrow’s utopia we must first start by acknowledging today’s dystopia, beginning with our…
Death and the Maiden: Reflections on Art and Loss
by Tony McKenna “I was able to see it again but through different eyes. The painting was transformed. Now the two people the artist depicts seemed more exposed to me, more human.”
INTERROGATED
by Tamara Al-Qaisi-Coleman “His wrists are cuffed against the bars of this prison beyond prisons As if a man with brown skin cannot travel without implications of terror”
SAN ISIDRO
by Tamara Al-Qaisi-Coleman “You watched men dig holes deep into the earth Until their straw hats disappeared into the black Dumping bodies of sugar mill workers into these mass graves”
Abject Permanence
by Carlos Campos Jr “Obsession is abject permanence Desiring end but remaining there”
A Smile without a Shield
by Jazzib Akhtar “There’s something about experiencing racism in real time, it often comes at times when you don’t expect it. What is it about 12 weaponizing everything?”
Until
By 3 Black Women Rice Students “until that original system of oppression upon which the police force is built is completely dismantled, it’s fuck 12”
Atlas Redeemed
by M.C. Zendejas “Holding up the Earth is a group of welders, grocery clerks, prisoners, waitstaff, sex workers, and secretaries, etc.”
Black Hair Ghazal
by Aris Kian “knots, cornrows, two-strand flat twists and drips between my legs, i’m taught to keep my girlhood”
Brown Protagonist
by Aris Kian “I am penned as dust and dawn, as sunlight and pink horizon, mixing cement”
Circus Act
by Aris Kian “Black girl be the best assistant / with how she falls / victim to a show / she never asked to be inspotlight spotlight”
Code Switch
by Aris Kian “furling, sucking air into his chest, & I thought, ‘that! that is the language I want for myself.’”
Featured Artist: Lina Habazi
“My art is an expression of my ever-evolving relationship with identity as a Muslim Palestinian-American woman. I am interested in reviving materials from the past, specifically from my heritage to imagine their place in my life today.”
Houston Review Of Books 