My name is Low from YOLOW Zines. That's Y-O-L-O-W zines. I will be reading the introduction and a piece, "Washing Rice," from "Did You Eat?" a 32-page zine by 22 artists of color about appreciating our food culture, in the face of colonization and appropriation. I am reading over the track, "Cosmic Relevance," by Unheard Music Concepts. "Did you eat?" is something you say if you have been away from someone for an hour or a decade. Something you understand in your mother tongue, even if you don't speak the language. Something that means, "I love you. I care about you. Can I share what I have with you?" This zine is dedicated to any Black, Indigenous, Person of Color who has created home with the phrase, "Did you eat?" This zine is dedicated to our families and ancestors of the diasporas of space, place, and time. To our relationships made by blood and by sharing recipes, meals, and stories. "Washing Rice" by L. Kling. Cooked rice, congee, mochi, rice noodles, risotto, paella, sake, paper, rice milk… there are so many ways that we consume rice. We throw it at weddings, we offer it to our ancestors, we eat it as babies and as elders. I eat rice with practically every meal. Rice can seem like a monolithic food, considering it provides more than ⅕ of calories consumed by humans and half of the world depends on it as a staple food. (Wikipedia) However, as an ancient grain grown on every continent except Antarctica, there are more than 40,000 types of rice! And every person and culture has their favorite type and way to prepare it. Short grain, long grain, glutinous, aromatic, sweet, nutty, brown, white, black, red... My favorite rice is Japanese short grain white rice. This is how I wash it. Exactly the same as my mom, and her mom, and probably her mother before her. After measuring your rice, add cold water and stir the rice with your hands. Gently pour off the water, one, two, three times. Work gently so grains of rice do not get washed away. The water does not need to be clear! Let drain in a sieve for 5-30 minutes. When you are ready to cook your rice, either on the stove or in a rice cooker, place the uncooked rice in the pot, and, with your finger pointing down and the tip of your finger touching the top of the rice, add cold water to the top of the nail bed of your pointer finger. Or you can use a 1:1.2 rice to water ratio. I’ve been preparing rice in this way for so long that I forget that not everyone knows how to do it, and not everyone does it the same way. Out of curiosity, I recently asked my social media network if they washed their rice, and I got so many responses! Keep in mind this is just a sample of some of my friends, and is not meant to definitively categorize anything, but spark some conversations about cultural food practices. Some people don’t wash their rice because they grew up with instant/boil-in-a-bag rice, or possibly because eating rice is something that they’ve adopted in recent generations and their rice is really processed and homogenous. Some BIPOC folks don’t wash or soak their rice because they combine it with oil as the first stage of cooking and don’t like the rice to absorb water at that stage. Rice washing seems less common in parts of Central America according to my friends from Mexican, Bolivian, Ecuadorian cultures. Most white people just said that they didn’t know they were “supposed to.” BIPOC folks I heard from who are dedicated rice washers belonged to cultures including being Black, Southern, Singaporean, Peruvian, Desi, Korean, Japanese, Puerto Rican. Most of us learned from our mothers. We come from places that have been eating rice for thousands of years, before it was heavily processed and homogenized and (in the US) enriched, often acquiring rice in bulk. White people who wash their rice were taught by BIPOC folks, or the internet told them to do it to reduce the sticky starchiness of rice, or grew up in countries where rice might have stones or chaff or weevils so washing was necessary. For many of us, rice is so much more than a staple food ingredient. The Mandarin Chinese (飯 fàn), Japanese (米 gohan), and Korean (밥 bap) words for “rice” are the same as for “food”/“meal.” Rice nourishes our bodies, food culture, and traditions. Rice is a whole meal.

Harmonia Desordenada / / Disordered Harmony Beyond sight, wake to the present moment of a next breadth, a quaint array a dull glimmer All leading to your New Fear's Eve. It is here. Where you are now. Receive it without distractions, nor hesitancy, with the most open of arms, and hearts. Make it Welcome. FEAR, the Inciter of Doubt only exists to challenge your element, Potential. Let it come to you Confront it and overcome; it was meant to elevate your spirit. Hold your self in Grace, Just like blooms in Floral Space.

SPRING BLESSINGS ⤷ ⤷⤷⤷ “Things happen slowly over time and then they happen all at once.” ↻⤷↻ Helicopters buzzing around. Feels like we’re in the middle of something. The light doesn’t look like we’re in Los Angeles. The weather is cold and windy, I get into my car and start driving. There are at least ten police cars next to the pupusa shop on Fletcher. They’ve blocked the side streets. I wonder what has happened. Makes me think it was probably something sad. It was raining this morning and the visibility on the freeway was horrible. I had already forgotten what this feels like – feels like entering a big grey cloud of seeing nothing. ↶↶↶↶ Līga tells me that I’m at this point she knows very well – the point where you start to doubt everything. She tells me not to believe it. The feeling is “like drugs. Remind yourself that it’s not real.” ←↘︎↘︎↶ What hurts, lick it full of love. ⤴︎⤴︎ I’m at my parents’ summer cabin just outside of the city and my jogging route here is one of my favourites in the world. It’s close to the sea and there is a road going through the forest to get to the very end of the beach, where the sea meets the river, people in swimming suits all around, the asphalt, full of stitches, is shining in the sun, uncool little cafes and shops, a couple of Soviet white brick apartment buildings, and the sea, it is at the very end of it, but, see, I never jog that far, the asphalt stops at one point, and I just can’t run through thick sand. ↖︎⤶⤶⤶⤶ Navigation: “Keep on the right lane to turn left.” Thinking about the heart as a beginning for everything that is important, but also a bodily organ. Can’t stop stuff from happening; can’t force stuff into happening. ⤣⤿⤿⤾ Driving home, next to my house, a billboard is flickering. It says something, like, choose a path, then turn another direction. ↺ Big chunks of pink guava. I wonder why life often feels circular and simultaneously like something to keep hitting against; holding the heart in my palm, forehead bleeding. ⤿⤺ A swampy and damp place with very low visibility. Everything is kind of mouldable and warm. Holding a flashlight, pushing myself through. Maybe, that’s what this is for now and I’m fully immersed. You buzz next to my ear and whisper about a light reflecting structure that is somewhere out there, you tell me to hold onto the flashlight “because it’s impossible to know when it’s going to crash right into you.” ↖︎↖︎↖︎↖︎↖︎ Tired, eating very greasy food. Yesterday someone told me that sometimes the recommendations online (“You might also like”) are actually created by people not algorithms. Searching for rain boots online, nothing really excites me. Talking to Amanda, she tells me that Robert Pattison once sat on her coat at Crawfords. She had to ask him to get off of it. There is a pair of rain boots with a huge zipper in front. A smashed persimmon on the asphalt. ⤶⤶↴⥀ The moon smiling behind a magnolia tree. A man gets out of his car. He has a Moon Juice tote bag on his shoulder and a Big Gulp in his hand. I’m sceptical, but there is someone breathing: “Two things that seem like opposites can both be true.”

Testing, testing. Hey, everybody. This is Nathaniel Osollo. I'm gonna be reading, The Universe, which is a short comic from a collection called Point of You: Where Do You Want to Be? which was published by Cow House Press in 2017. --- Recently, I said some words. And I'm reasonably sure they were wrong. It was something along the lines of, "No one cares about you." I think what I meant was, "The Universe is indifferent to you." When it comes to reaching for the stars and achieving your dreams The Universe will do very little for you on purpose. It is rare that The Universe even notices you. You have to do for yourself. That is to say... That no one and nothing will automatically give up what they want so that you can succeed. You are on your own. You'd think this would go without saying. But some of us have to learn it. The Universe is this giant organism. And we're all a part of it. All the planets are here. They are all linked. We are part of that network. You. Me. Your friends and family. They may love you... And support you... But no one will do the work for you. If you want something you must build it. Make it. Take it. And while you're working on that goal... The Universe just might meet you halfway. --- Thank you.

Ice Melted Ice melted from my warm touch which only made me cry wind blew so fast through my hair the smells of cigarettes and regrets drowned my concentration. Lady bugs make me laugh childish thoughts, blue skies imply creations in a place never meant to be created but yet became a whole world of miracles. Charmed by dark gloomy nights, bugs that were filled with a sense of beauty turned to creatures of wickedness in a winter storm full of fright and coldness, that stay into the night.

Hi, this is Hope from gutwrench press and the keep writing project. Every month I print and mail a letterpress printed postcard to subscribers. Half is for them to keep, the other half they send back to me after answering a prompt or question. Today I am reading an exquisite corpse style poem created with guest writers and subscribers together. I provided a title and asked Brian Mattarochia to send 3-10 lines. Subscribers received this and offered the next line. I chose one and sent it to Anis Mojgani repeating the process to finish with Jenn Marie Nunes. Each of these writers sent me lines in their handwriting, which I made into a printing plate and letterpress printed. The first card was sent September 2019 with the third installment sent in May. This is issue number 133 of Keep Writing and just in the span of time since starting this poem, I decided to move from New Orleans to Portland Oregon. I arrived just in time for the shelter in place order. WE CREATE NOTHING ALONE I took your picture with me in my pocket when i went to the underworld when I wandered into the woods in my dreams and never came back never emerged from the other side never came back never came back out there was a tiny perfect spider consuming me and it was you. You and the rest of your siblings were gathering somewhere and I was walking with the tiniest of blueberries the sun overhead bright as a new tooth I was missing something in me not sure if it was what was always had once been in the hole or if it was now the hole itself but there was a song and it was using my body to make itself move to make itself loud and that which was tiny was now immense exhibit A the system cracking out its own ribs or a cat flat on the tarmac an eruption of flies and when you name me the small skin of which contained me lets you in.

If it Involves Fake Smiling I Probably Won't Go: A Zine About Being An Introvert by Whitney Romberg read by me Whitney Romberg. Introvert Time: It's a Sunday morning and I'm sitting in a café drinking a medium roast coffee the table I'm sitting at is a large table as I spread out my belongings including two journals when my primary journal and when my travel journal, my planner, my warmest scarf, my current special beanie, 42 varieties of art pens, a bagel, the plate that the bagel was on, two napkins, my phone, a pair of headphones in case somebody tries to talk to me and my portable archaeology site also known as my purse which is estimated to be about 10 pounds. Sometimes I will people watch for hours as I casually listen in on the conversations or make up a story about who they are for my own amusement. When I'm not people watching I will be drawing or writing as the calm that is seemingly so rare plants the seeds for new ideas giving them a chance of becoming a tangible piece When I'm doing neither of these things I might be dicking around on my phone or thinking about something that I did when I was a child that I now see as my social awkwardness beginning to manifest itself. These special mornings are what I have coined my introvert time. For me my introvert time is when I relinquish all obligations to my everyday life. I am always alone during these times and I use the time as I see fit. Many of my introvert hours are spent alone in my home studio in the wee hours of the night. A night owl from childhood, I love being awake when everyone else is asleep as I create and run away with my inner world. If it were up to me I would be up at all hours of the night but I have come to appreciate mornings as well as the night spent in solitude. Growing Up Introverted:The Library As a Sanctuary: There are many ways I could talk about why my childhood wasn't like most. Aside from being one of two Asian kids in my entire hometown, growing up queer but not knowing it at the time, and having a speech impediment, I was very quiet child this affected my relationships with other children and the adults around me. I never really cared to have a large group of friends but instead wanted to have one or two close friends so I could spend my lunches with teachers would after calling me even if I didn't raise my hand or tell me how I didn't participate enough and if I did choose to participate I would be met with passive aggressive comments along the lines of “oh so you finally decided to join us” or “I didn't know that you could talk!” There are a few things that are more discouraging than when you do something that is hard for you and find that all actions you take are punished……..I would be encouraged to seek out a larger group of friends and whenever I did I thought that I genuinely wanted to connect with that most 2 people and the rest could just go home. A number of phone calls were made to my parents expressing their concerns about why I was so quiet all the time. They thought it was because I could be depressed or special-needs or I didn't speak english well enough. Despite being more or less able to do well in school especially loving art science and creative writing my quiet nature caused me to be alone a lot. I begin to develop my imagination through drawing, music, and books. I love love love love love love books and I especially love libraries. For a lot of children, the library seems like the last place you want to be but for me, the library was my safe space at the library. My inner world was supplemented with characters and different roles that I can only dream about visiting. When I read these books I was no longer at school but on an epic adventure of self actualization! I was no longer a quiet child but someone who is brave or had companions that they share their adventures with or was a cat owner. These books became my friends and they gave my mini self hope for the future. When you are a quiet young bibliophile who prefers stories to peers, you become mysterious to children and adults.At first it was hard for me and I was often bullied for it. Over time I begin to embrace what a mystery I was. Some of the stories that have been made up about me I found highly amusing. In adulthood I found that in some ways, elementary school never ends. Books are still amazing, I grew up to be an artist, and I still have weird funny shit made up about the mysterious me. Introversion in Adolescence: Very Early Adulthood When I Got to Middle School I started forcing myself to talk to people. I would never give this advice to others, but forcing myself to talk to people has got me some of my closest friends who I still talk to today. I begin to go to dances and parties at peoples houses. I started sneaking out of my parents house to meet my friends which is such a foreign concept to me as I spent the majority of my first decade with basically no friends. When I began to have friends I wanted all of my friends to be close friends. This became an impossible task little did I know one of the problems of having so many friends was that it began to drain my energy even when I was with people I enjoyed hanging out with I felt an overwhelming sense of wanting to be alone after a few hours the one exception to this was when I was around one or two friends who I love the most. I could spend days with them and I would feel completely recharged. This was a unique sensation for me. I began to resent the fact that my energy would deplete around others and I would help it by powering through events and trying harder to connect with my friend’s friends. Needless to say this was unsuccessful. My senior year of high school was when I first took the Myers-Briggs test I scored the ENFP. extroversion. I scored the E by one percentage point when I was still struggling with the fact that I could be an introvert. This test that made me believe I was indeed an extrovert. College My Early 20s and Relationships. Accepting My Introvert Heart Who Just Wanted Some Damn Time to Think: When we graduated a lot of my friends went up to UC Santa Cruz including my two closest friends. I opted to go to community college with the promise of transferring. This left me heartbroken and the first few weeks at MPC were some of the loneliest weeks since my times in elementary school. I briefly tried to form friendships with a couple of my friend’s friends but quickly said fuck that after one of them asked me how I was going to make any money as a "starving artist” in the other one I didn't really give a damn about anyway. This topic is definitely another zine or friendship level but my first years in college for my baby steps and navigating my clear identity along with suddenly not having anyone around to support that journey. I desperately wanted to feel like I belonged somewhere, so I did what any shy, friendless, kinda artsy but haven’t established my style yet, baby queer, bibliophile would do: I did hours of research about ender and sexuality at MPC’s then newly rebuilt, updated, natural lit, library and rented a private study room *swoon* Along with the library, I Started taking Feminist Studies courses and spending my lunches in the MPC Women’t Center. I immersed myself in all social science resources that incidentally influenced my art. Though I had a lot of fellow budding activist acquaintances, I still craved what I saw as a true friend. My masquerade as an extrovert reached it’s peak when I started MPC’s first LGBTQ group, I loved being a leader of a group, but it became draining when I tried to take on a variety of tasks without taking care of myself to recharge. I was told that college students didn;t need to recharge, being made to feel like I always had to burn a candle at all ends. It was hard to manage different types of people. Some were more assertive, some were more quiet, and some wanted to take part but were too busy to follow through with commitments. When it was time to transfer to UCSC, my close friends who I made through my group were also moving, I looked at articles written by students who were transferring colleges and looking back, many of them rewarded extroverted behavior. “Leave your dorm door open so people can come in” “Go to ice breaker events and parties”. I did both of those things and as a result got exhausted. My pattern of having 2 close friends continued but as usual they had other friends as well. I was rarely alone in the dorms so I would retreat into the studios and work there all night. Little did I know that was the thing I needed to recharge. Many years later, my current therapist and I talk about embracing introversion a lot. An introvert herself, we talk about honoring ourselves and our time to recharge. It’s taken forever to embrace introversion as a part of me because it’s too often that extroverted behavior is rewarded. IN a world where extroversion is rewarded, I try to remember these things: I have the right to stay home if I need to, I can’t make it out to every single event. I have the right to tell others about my need to be alone for a bit. If they don’t understand, that’s on them I have a lot of friends, but few close friends. That’s ok. It’s ok to invest your energy into people you truly connect with. We as introverts are extremely aware of what’s around us. We may be quiet, but we are never blind. Introverts have some of the world’s most thoughtful, intellectual minds and hearts If It involves fake smiling, I don’t have to go. Thank you for listening! @whitneykittyart

The Sound of Silence by Angelina Tran The sound of silence You can’t hear it But ... You almost feel it What does it sound like In an early winter morning A little grey bird Closes his wings Holds his voice And lets his mind drift Far far away What does it sound like In a clear day of spring A little seed Says its last goodbye And follows the wind Into Its once-in-a-lifetime journey What does it sound like When a wild plant by the sea Grows on its own Withers by itself Living life Always At its fullest What does it sound like In the mid-summer afternoon A bee flaps his tiny wings Constantly Tirelessly So he can fly So he can dream A million moments of the same dream In his daily life What does it sound like When the sun Pierces Through the leaves As layers after layers of green cells Being warmed Being heated Being burned Day after day What does it sound like In a deep dark forest A sapling All by itself Yearns for the light Feeling too old For the time has passed Feeling too young For the years are about to come What does it sound like In a lazy day of autumn A squirrel Stops looking for his acorns He simply wanders Around and around Just for the sake Of being free What does it sound like When a little rainbow Was born into life As it shines As it fades Through The shades of might What does it sound like Oh It sounds like silence We can’t hear it But We almost feel it From The bottomless imagination of mine And The tranquil heart of yours.

The only thing that soothes my mind lately is making a collage. As I cut images into pieces, these images present new meanings to me. What is a collage but a new whole, formed from decontextualized, disparate pieces of other things? isn’t that what matter itself is? Matter can be neither created nor destroyed. This is a law of nature. Everything that is, has been formed from something else. Everything we know, and life itself, is like a collage. We are all collages. We can take the fragments of the world around us and build something new. I’m Susie. I’m an LA-based illustrator, artist, and designer. I’m currently experimenting with visual narrative through collage, comics, animation, and the web. Find my work at antimatter.zone or follow me on Instagram @antimatterzone.

An offering of stone fruit I say hideout you say master I say hideout you say slumber— holdup Say holdup we say tank tincture The diameter and doctors running against care toward pitosin. Pit. I think of the pit, an arts collective near the mountains in glendale, pit Of despair, pit the place my friend dyes Lime green and blue, who listens to slit; I made that up, who listens to hole—no It’s the breeders, who runs to the mailbox, opens it closes it, and back to the corner as exercise, in bursts. How many rounds. Tonight, I do not think of vampira of instagram or her thirty—no, eleven— Cavities. That/she is reserved for morning, and chamomile induced exhaustion. Chamomile supported exhaustion. I want to quit, no more hospitals, Liz says, Doctors who scare birthing folks into trauma. Maria who likens chamomile flowers to babies’ fingernails. Our friend aware of his body Bring the pain. I say hideout you say destroy; I say destroy you say keep us as A raft. I shudder to feelthink any longer, peony, palimpsest, practitioner. Our friend mentions his fear of becoming homeless because of allergies, Unable to live in sinus peace anywhere. My throat hardens, considering this. Hard pain, assuming dissipation, drunk on dissipation— I can’t correct the torment and neurosis that continues, how to get in and out of your body at the same time. We shuffle Shufflesuffer Makes it lighter, already a bearable barely kind of demise. We practice pronouns in the car, on the drive to pick up camping gear. We do We do nothing mythic or much of a story in that. But here it is on the page, And I’m making room to say there Is no room for t.e.r.f. t.rans e.xclusionary r.adical f.eminists Back off, don’t claim. turf , as in t.e.r.f. Sigh with grief at the wide magical world. Rosemary emits its blessings from two tied bundles, in a cup of fresh water. Liz says, We hear the house, whole.

my name is elie katzenson and i'll be reading mona // changa, a zine i published in january 2019. when I was a kid, people would ask if my mom was biologically related to me. i looked white and she didn't. around MLK day, seven year old me asked my mom if she was black. that's when she said it was time to leave colorado (one of the more ironic state names). she is anita carolina. i'm maria elise. my grandmother is emilia trujillo. my grandfather is rumaldo. northern new mexico hosts many lineages- chaves and mondragons, medinas, romeros, and garcias. 'rural'. perpetually pregnant. anxiety disorders. cicel on his 8th DUI. we don't know exactly who came before us but we know that we have been here for a long time. the term genizaro came up in the news recently, in a new york times article detailing the history of indian slaves who were sold to hispanic families in the 18th and 19th centuries. genizaros, like black slaves, took the surnames of their masters, and converted to their religion. in the southwest, that religion was catholicism. i envy people with tribal membership, because it's proof. my face is confusing to people who know i'm not white, and it's also confusing to me. my mom is at a crafts fair in taos, and an indian man running a booth asks which tribe is hers. she says "what tribe?" he smirks- "ah, slave indian." three generations ago my family wouldn't go out at night because of the brujas, witches that would fuck you up. my great great grandmother was a curandera who rode great distances on horseback to deliver babies and dispel madness. i wonder if perhaps their catholicism was not a contradiction, a faith with censers, the body of christ, and over 10000 saints. sage smudges our censers, the body of christ better as a sopaipilla. the prevalence of 'nervousness' in generation after generation. poor yes too many people in your business yes afraid of water yes (rumaldo never took a bath more than three inches high). emilia trujillo grew up the oldest of eight in an adobe homestead in the llano /prairie where people got eaten by bears, lit themselves on fire, and made their own clothes while praying a lot. many years later, my uncle, a rancher, exploded his insides with benzos and booze. my mom denies that she has ever been the victim of racism. i remember the crowded pool at a shithole retirement community in the outskirts of tucson and the community offer singling her out to ask for her visitor's pass, all eyes on us. my father has affectionately called her a squaw. in her mind, ignoring racism removes its power over you. in my mind, to ignore is to let fester. i want to belong here, to know that i am unequivocally of these people & this place. being mixed, that belonging might never be unequivocal- but i can rejoice in the intricacies and mysteries of our existence, keep on keepin' on.

The sun is painful and ecstatic. I am a cold fish in this new sun. My skin hurts and I feel an old feeling. Why are you the mammal to the feeling I have about taste? You woke up with your head in the sheets. Stuck in a dream thick as a swamp. I want to taste something crystalline. I want it to sit perfectly on my tongue and leave me dreaming of chameleons. Each cave holds a different kind of darkness. I sit and wait for the last one to reappear. Reappear, reappear but the heat is making my memory taut. All night I walk around the neighborhood looking into houses. People keep their homes lit up on the inside. Across the mountain tops they all sit together and the air holds a secret. Today the air also holds a secret. That is what has replaced the darkness. Even the breeze has something to tell me but I can’t remember the language. Why are you the invertebrate to the ache I have about air?

"Scatter Plot" 1. I mean really vicious this time an hour at the fundraiser then back in our blankets / the city a drum I forgot how to roll my clone says we’re off to a pretty good start 2. that's not writing that’s an auto mechanic flush against the bedrock I mean machine sorry I mean poem here it comes rearing its shiny head gossiping for dear life 3. language I unload in one big thirst now I’m writing you in my writing voice / imagine countertenor of my clone(s) keep the spotlight right there any couplet ending on a grope 4. an hour chewing foam here then back in the bunker/ virus what virus desire’s a hack job I could tell you exactly where it’s photoshopped apply the clone’s logic to my cheek I’m honing diamonds stupid 5. with my many friends and my friends’ many hands after all what do we do with any substance left out too long banana bread / a toothache we can pass back and forth