“You belong to me is a colorful piece with man and woman. The man holds the woman’s heart in his hand. Is this love? Possession cannot be defined as love, except by the possessor. The bright colors offset the theme of this painting.

It doesn’t depict violence as its true definition, but it is more than implied.”

“your fingertips on my spine, illuminating each vertebrae/ individually, the only light to be found on this road, where the canals/ run like arteries on either side, the skeletons of power plants/ bare, the shuttered darkness like a layer of topsoil/ on my car.”

-Amanda Leal, “Magma”

“My bones creep out from the seeping soil, dwarfed even by the claws of the ancient lizards embedded in the same bank. The geologist watches the bank collapse while rain pours in curtains off the brim of her sunhat. She sees my rib jut out of the ground, swiftly washed clean in the downpour.”

“I think it comes down to balancing the action of a story and trusting the reader. I need the reader to know what’s happening but I don’t need to paint them a bloody picture. I can show a burst of violence and then cut to a quieter moment, or I can show the effects of abuse instead of showing the abuse itself and trust the reader to fill in the blanks.”