When I’m painting I don’t think about gender. When I’m doing artwork, it’s about the only time I get to forget that I’m a woman, that I’m Asian, and I belong to a certain social class. These things that define me in my waking life disappear when I’m painting.

The first time I saw her she was in a window. Under her left breast was taped a cardboard sign: Love, For a Limited Time Only. That’s what caught my eye, the sign, not her breasts, though those were nice too. I stared at the sign a moment, reading it over like a poem, to reveal its secret meaning.

If someone asked Mother what she thought Daughter would grow up to be, she wouldn’t in a million years have guessed this.

And when this will be solved in a believable and natural way, it will create new forms of narratives, unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.

The woman sits on a bench overlooking the sea. Below, the child runs along the deserted beach, arms outstretched…

When she was young it was the sick room, post-war green painted walls you could chalk on, where you were quarantined if ill. She’d sit at the open window singing to the house next door – she loved folk tales.

‘Do you know where dead birds are?’ the child asked the stone, because no one could answer her question.

Almost all the passengers / stare at their cellphones / solemnly attentive / to kindling screens

Drive the brain into books like nails
Fix the heart to the Muse's chest

Golden sepia shades
goodbye trains leaving my thoughts

I meet people
I observe their shoes.
They say a lot.

None. No one is not connected to someone else in the city who was hurt that night or dead. It is
the no-degrees of separation or escape. Or times we’ve been borne to. Everyone knows someone

The shiny red leather. The silky red ribbons. The silver toe and heel taps. At school she pictured herself wearing the shoes and imagined how they would sound on the old wooden floor of her dancing class.

That’s how the child fed the stone to let it live.

I was a very active child. My mom said that I started walking very early when I was young. I loved to go to long hiking with my father and dogs. I remember that I just loved being physically active.

She scrambles over rocks to where a solitary rowan survives – a rowan, shaped by the wind, spindly, struggling. She runs her hand down its smooth silvery bark, ties red thread to its branches and, between arriving and leaving, stops for a moment.

She opens the door to the library and walks barefoot, following the arrows marking the way; turn right, turn left, straight ahead. Row after row of memories, stacked, classified, catalogued, labelled – shelved. Her fingers, playing moments like a harp, release the fragrance of sweet peas, damask roses. She has brought ribbons with her.

I favor the left side a smidge.
I read with my left eye, write with my left hand,

So that my friends / might love me more / perhaps I should stop / writing about them

The Creative Process is collaborating with film schools and universities on intensive workshops and 4th-year courses combining film and literature. Multi-disciplinary artist Bronka Nowicka is directing one such program at Łódź Film School, and we are honored to showcase the imaginative works of their students and faculty.

I am in love / Without you / Infatuated with a thought / Born and raised within fiction / I am in love with a story

Intimacy requires time and closeness. Intimacy emerges when we dare to surrender to ourselves and each other with no need to defend or judge.

The Creative Process is collaborating with film schools and universities on intensive workshops and 4th-year courses combining film and literature. Multi-disciplinary artist Bronka Nowicka is directing one such program at Łódź Film School, and we are honored to showcase the imaginative works of their students and faculty.

I should have loved you when I had a chance. When the time was right and, as they say, all the ducks were lined up, and it would have all been so easy. That small window, open just a crack, but with a crowbar and this thing growing in me–was it even then love?–I could have got down there and pried it open.

I hear the slamming of a door, bolted shut, which belongs to a house with a weather-beaten chimney. On the street tinkles the sour moaning of the windows’ metal bars. Street lamps are shining in a depressive state. A seventy-two-year-old helpless loner walks past me.