Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is working on a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania’s Comparative Literature & Literary Theory program. Her poetry has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Gulf Coast, and Missouri Review, among others. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf and TENT Conferences as well as the Auschwitz Jewish Center. Julia is the author of The Bear Who Ate the Stars, winner of Split Lip Magazine's 2014 Uppercut Chapbook Award. She is also Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine.
The sky in June rises with horns, my grandmother’s about her neck in gold, and sets with chelae, claws, pincers, the many names for mother. A bull gives birth to a crab, a crab to a ram, a ram to the cusp of scorpion and centaur— the sky grows full with parturition. How many names for this? The looking up…. Read more →
mother told me about the baby elephant in the Chinese zoo who was rejected by his mother and cried for the next five hours. animal-well of childhood. an animal of grief. I’m O negative, I told her, the universal donor. I’ll need a shot on the 28th week and another one after. to this she warned me about the body,… Read more →
Only one out of ten people born in a year of the Goat finds happiness (十羊九不全) ~ Chinese folk saying Some would drown theirs as soon as they were born. Luck won’t come with age, they’d say, and death in water proved far easier than milk. Some would cut theirs out early to change the animal while others would stop… Read more →