read - resist - revolt
April 2026
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current collection
A fever dream of lust and regret told in impossibly terse poetry. Riley Manchester is a bold new voice who writes for a new, sapphic fourth-wave of feminist poetry that is unapologetically human.
The narrative is fluid, raw, and naked. The collection is a savagely honest view into the complex and unspoken themes of romantic relationships: infidelity, addiction, depression, sexuality, and the self-destruction driven by the idea of being unlovable.
Brilliant in concept and deftly delivered, this collection grabs you by the heart and forces you through the poet’s agony at finding, losing, and mourning love. The path is not straight, and the thought rambles while the poetic narrative remains razor sharp.
Paris, Texas is not a film. It’s a hallucination stitched together with tumbleweeds, telephone wires, and the last remaining scraps of the American Dream, floating somewhere in the scorched no-man’s-land between memory and madness.
I first saw this lizard-licking dystopia on a mushroom-fueled bender in Paris, France, a dissonance that only made the beauty of Wim Wenders, that brooding German bastard, more acute. The film parachutes right into the heart of Reagan-era rot and somehow finds poetry in the dried-up husk. He drags you by the eyeballs across a landscape that looks like it was designed by a drunk Cormac McCarthy and shot through with Ry Cooder’s steel guitar—the kind of sound that makes you feel like you’re slowly dying in a motel outside El Paso.
Enter Travis Henderson, played by Harry Dean Stanton like a ghost in a cowboy hat—sunburned, silent, staggering out of the desert like he’s seen the face of God and puked. This is not your tidy, Hollywood redemption arc. No, this is the long, slow disintegration of a man who already fell off the edge of the world and is trying—futilely—to find the road back.
The bastard doesn’t speak for the first thirty minutes, and when he does, it’s with the kind of cracked, vulnerable whisper that sounds like it’s been fermenting in the ruins of his own head. Stanton doesn’t act—he haunts. The man is a human cigarette burn, and you can smell the soul-rotting ache in every scene.
And then there’s that booth—that goddamn booth—where Travis, shrouded in blue neon, pours his broken heart into a one-way mirror like a confessional from hell. It’s not just a monologue, it’s an exorcism. Nastassja Kinski listens like a saint strapped to a guilt-trip crucifix. You watch this scene and realize that every petty grievance in your life is bullshit. That this—this flood of regret and tender human disaster—is the real story.
This is America unspooled. Not the beer-guzzling, flag-waving America of Sunday football and missile parades—but the quiet, decaying America beneath it. The America of lost fathers, burned bridges, and cracked neon signs flickering in a vacuum of hope.
Paris, Texas is a punch in the chest and a whisper in your ear. It doesn’t tell you what it means—it feels like what it means. And what it means is that we are all Travis, stumbling toward the horizon, praying for someone to answer when we call out in the dark.
Watch it sober if you want, but I won’t. It’s better to take a walk through your own personal purgatory first. Maybe then you’ll understand.
Sipping tea by candlelight
Ideas of romance or reprieve
A first glance might conceive
But a tool for survival
The candles still loom
It might seem odd
We’re dancing with snow beneath our feet
But it’s actually warmer than indoors with no heat
Years of torture and countless airstrikes
Three weeks without smoke is the longest we’ve seen
While a month of no power has become the usual scene
Through sleepless nights and famished days
We rely on each other to walk through the haze
We mourned and grieved our missing children
And later discovered
Them listed like cattle
And given new names
Nothing can ever be the same
The destruction and pain is here to stay
We hope in time we find a way
To rebuild what’s been lost
Before the memories fade
Will we get the chance to remind them of their names
Or will they be the ones carrying guns
During the next wave
-linda m. crate
if i love her,
and she loves me;
our love is true
and radiant and full
of magic and mutual
adoration and compassion—
then what should you
care?
me kissing a girl
won’t end the world,
me marrying a girl
won’t end the world;
you killing someone because
of who they love is destroying
someone’s world—
each of us is someone’s
whole universe,
and each of us is worthy;
everyone should have a place
in this earth to simply be—
and if your religion tells
you to hate someone then i
think you’re part of the wrong
religion or you are not
worshipping right,
because loving gods don’t tell
you to hate people
especially not for something
they cannot control;
love is love
and she comes in many
different shades, songs,
and poems and each of them
is beautiful.
true love
-Riley Manchester
True love
oh, that fucking romantic bullshit
but I’ll still remember
or at least I’ll pretend
to remember
because it easier to remember
than to just accept
that when the leaves did actually fall
that you just left
just packed up
and disappeared
Kailey Boronat
– azalea
TJ Sparkes
– bull in a china cabinet
Ashton M. Weis
– in like a
Penelope Schott
– nature-lover
Melissa Howells
– out on the street
it's all jazz
-whim grace
I draped myself all in black and everyone kept telling me how much they liked my outfit. When you vomit black in different textures out of the need to not be naked, people are very responsive. Maybe they too did not want to get dressed yesterday.
Wrapped in my layers of noir, I went to watch a friend play jazz down the street, in the oldest club in the city. My life is officially a novel, if it wasn’t before. I have to write it down for myself, because I have the tendency to forget everything; time, tone, truth… since it’s all so subjective to the alien life you surround yourself with and which dimension we are currently suspended in. So there will be more linear note taking.
The fresh girl at the door gasped at the year on my ID. Was a good moment. The longer I am in New Orleans, the more I lean into vampire status. It’s probably a good thing for my character. Some interesting arc. What is the plot, and how will it unfold?
The band popped, gurgled, chimed, and the room cheered. It was a nice feeling. Old songs and old men in a place where they celebrate something older. Sound. Gathering. Community. Jubilation just because. It is nice to live in a place where there is so much history. I find it comforting, and french bake myself in it most nights, lots of butter and bed. The city is good to me.
I went home before midnight, had a cry, and then slept so well, I don’t recall when I slept so long, so still, or so silently.
I’ve been writing so much music lately, I think I need help, to begin charting and arranging and archiving. All things witchy sirens are not great at. It’s something to weave spells. Something else to write it down in a language others can understand. So help. I will ask for help.
Symphonic swells well up in my heart. Dark grainy blues rumble wail in my waking. My inner voice chiming harmonies and sweet melodies, and I am just a girl, with two hands, and a small mind, and the sound needs places to go. But I have time. That I have been gifted in some weird endless Jesus buckets, that refill before I ask or think. Forever girl. Forever spring in the underworld.
Slowly the notes find their places. As I too slowly slowly find my place on this funny planet that some days resembles earth. There are fewer veils and more names. The humans are remembering their wings and tails and roots. In the electric morning there is always wonder. Just often we forget to listen.
I find it is helpful somedays to layer oneself in black and listen to jazz.
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the pisces
-melissa broder
A woman falls in love with a merman—yes, really—and somehow that’s not the most desperate thing she does.
Melissa Broder writes like she’s clutching a cigarette in one hand and a breakdown in the other; it’s beautiful, haunting, and all too relatable.
It’s like she is writing about my romantic escapades, wet, wild, and absolutely tragic.
amy stone
Perfect in absence, unfinished and unresolved, like a languid coffee with an old friend, with room for discussion between the quiet meaning of brush strokes and color, Amy Stone’s art is an invitation to explore the space between things.
What struck me first about her work wasn’t just the color, although it was expressive, but it was gorgeously layered. What I noticed first was space. It was the space between the colors and the shapes that gave her art such vibrancy. And immediacy. It calls the eye to search for those moments in time between the brush strokes to see the space where art lives. In that space, there is a decidedly unfinished yet complete feel about her work.
Sometimes, Amy Stone, the Seattle-based painter, admits she doesn’t tape or even paint the edges, but that is because the focus is on the sensual, feminine lines and forms that fill the canvas. She doesn’t present a full idea to the viewer. She presents a full concept in color and implores you to resolve it. To complete it. “That’s your job,” Stone says about finding the completion in her art. “Not mine.”
Like many artists, she has been creating her whole life. And like many artists, life tended to get in the way of creation. She has spent time outside of painting. Yet even those jobs, in advertising and wine sales, she still cultivates a creative lilt to her approach to work and life. She focuses on the big picture, the larger vision, and doesn’t dwell within the lines. “I was a wine rep,” she concedes. “But the kind that often leaves the wine key at home. Who shows up at a client’s business with wine but no way to open it?”
Amy Stone does.
Stone relates her work to the idea of Wabi-sabi, “the quintessential Japanese aesthetic,” she tells me. She often approaches a canvas first with a slight brush of color, almost like stretching a hue of linen to make the canvas less white, less stark, and less daunting. She then sees what the canvas has to say and imitates the things in her life with bold strokes, bright colors, and a decidedly feminine aura that imbues every painting with a visceral beauty to the complexities of everyday life.
The human form is an essential theme in her works, even when the form isn’t always visible. Like a sensual subtext, the warmth of shape, the beauty of feminine curve, is present behind the bold strokes and blocks of color. This inherent femininity gives a gentle comfort and ease to her abstract work. It makes her painting feel human and inviting, in a way that fails many other painters. “Body image is something many people struggle with, me included,” she confides. “And as we age, everything continues to shift, literally and figuratively. Incorporating the female form into my work has been a way for me to lean into this complicated, difficult, yet beautiful process.”
Born in New York and educated at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Hofstra University, she moved to Seattle in 2014 and picked up her brushes again. With her husband and two sons, she seeks out the beauty of the quotidian and splashes its color and intricate space to create tableaus of serene imperfections that are simultaneously impermanent and universal.
We spoke over the phone for over an hour, just two strangers exploring and sharing each other’s life stories. It was as easy as sitting across the table with an old friend in Paris, sipping espresso, remembering our first walking tour of the Pompidou. We talked about influences and ambitions and the crooked path back to art.
She exudes a genuine quality that is approachable, like an old pair of Vans and a well-worn, paint-spotted pair of jeans. Amy Stone is real, humble in her own accomplishments, and approachable. And full of color. And space. Just like her art.
Follow Amy Stone