Residents of the San Mateo and Chícharo neighborhoods in Santurce, Puerto Rico recall gallitos, a long forgotten neighborhood game in which opponents tie strings to the hard seeds of the algarroba fruit and take turns smashing each other’s gallito.
After years of disordered eating, I learned to listen quietly to real markers of hunger and realized, quite startlingly, that I am always hungry.
Kim TallBear writes an update on her post-Covid palate for food, drink, sex, and conversation, and opens her tattered copy of Simon(e)’s book for some inspired remote discourse.
Growing up in a country littered by the detritus of war, rural Laotians in the most heavily-bombed regions set off into the jungles to harvest unexploded ordnance that could either transform their family’s economic future or seal a terrible fate.
Deep in the interior of Mozambique, Indigenous tribes protect one of the world’s last undisturbed rainforests while contending with corporate extractivism and foreign conservation efforts that place their primordial livelihood in peril.
In the midst of a lockdown, Simon(e) van Saarloos questions their relationship to time, to dreams, to public space, and to the sexuality of voles.
Residents of the San Antón neighborhood in Carolina, Puerto Rico create oracles with botanical inks on behalf of loved ones who introduced them to the world of plants.
When Jason DaSilva, director and disability rights activist living with multiple sclerosis, is separated from his son, he has to make a decision: stay in New York and receive the medical care he needs, or move to Texas to be the father he wants to be.
In her response to Simon(e) van Saarloos, Kim TallBear discusses finding her polyamorous community, cross-border lovers, and navigating multiple relationships in a lockdown.
After co-creating a radio project that privileged rest, gossip, and informal knowledge production, Elaine W. Ho writes about the interplay between institutional care and her own body from the vantage point of her hospital bed in Hong Kong.
What does it mean to be ‘in community’? How do we do this in the day to day and in the contexts of multiple pandemics, settler colonialism, racism, sexism, the war on drugs, economic inequity, homophobia? What does it mean to create a collective that sustains and moves to act?
In this introductory letter from Simon(e) van Saarloos to Kim TallBear, Simon(e) explores where their perspectives on monogamy intersect, and where they might diverge.