Home: A Zine

Home: A Zine

 

What is home to you?

This, I asked of my dearest friends, my community, myself: the family with whom I have created a home during the last four years.

Here, I present the many beautiful iterations of our response.

Who are you? Why did you come? Are you doing the work you came here to do?

Who walks with you?

A collage of a European residential street and a crowded intersection in New York, with text comparing European beauty to New York's.

A freshly baked challah on a cutting board atop a striped red and white kitchen towel.

I collect leaves off my windowsill

Wet leaves

Wet leaves, knocked off the tree outside my window.

I dry them on my desk.

I write prayers on them.

They do not burn, they do not transform and release my prayer into ash and smoke.

I am angry (I am so angry).

I crush these leaves and they smell:

the place I come from

home.

In these leaves, not on them, not in the frantic prayers that ask for a transformation that is too great.

My world, my homes do not need more fire,

Does not need to burn to return me, return to me.

A long-form compilation of various tidbits that people have said, against a purple-yellow gradient backround.

Xandi's small dog sleeping on a fuzzy blanket.

(A conversation with my fish)

A series of watercolor paintings alongside text of a conversation between Lia and her fish.

In you I find stillness

A joyous stillness that moves blood to the edge of my flesh

Pulsating against its barrier

In you I find

My head cradled softly and with vigor

In you there is stillness

A body of water crashing, flowing

Twirling its inhabitants

From a distance or depth

Holding life in your depth, warm and still

Precarious and proliferating, safe

Hannah smiles wide, bakery coffee in hand, along the South Brooklyn waterfront.

I love this city perhaps more than I ever thought possible,


Four hands work to cook dinner together. A bowl of sliced apples... Roasted squash, brussels sprouts, carrots and potatoes... A sauce being stirred.

I love all of your iterations, and I can’t wait to know more…

A lit forearm, laughter, food of the gods. These are our memories compressed, integrated into sparkling jewels to be embedded in the limited space of our minds. A scene is turned into a mnemonic, a conversation reduced to a single phrase, a day distilled into a fleeting feeling of joy.

A collage of two journal entries about NYC and waterbirds, as well as various images of embracing and spending time outdoors.

Time’s arrow is the loss of fidelity in compression. A sketch, not a photograph. A memory is a recreation, precious because it is both more and less than the original.

I really think your friendship changed my life.

Where in this beyond are they taking me?

Hannah and Charlotte frame the gorgeous, green landscape of an apple orchard.

A journal entry from a womxn who stayed at HOWL (a womxn's-only land) for 3 months.

It is a constant act of creation, recreation, reflection, imagination

They do not all come at once, and they do not come once and for all

Lucy and Taylor, wrapped in winter coats and hats, wait for the D train at Bay Parkway station.

vous êtes des petites soleils …

They spoke loudly, with abandon, and though I wasn’t quite listening to what they said, I felt attuned to the expressions in their eyes and the movements of their lips. It was a deep sense of home in a place I’d never been—a place we were actively creating.

Hands holding a pink scratcher lotto ticket, pointing to a symbol.

Lesbianism

Wearing a tie-dye sweatshirt, holding out a bowl of deeply purple plums in a white bowl.

Fresh bread, sweet crepes frying in caramelized sugar, bitter coffee, lobsters sitting in beds of ice, garden air just after it rains

We grabbed each other’s hands and held each other close, arriving at the final steps of our journey

A collage of feminist iconography.

 
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