Features • Fall 2025 - Diagnosis
Poetry • Fall 2025 - Diagnosis
after Ellen Bass
O black bean boy, O owl eyes,
O package of muscle and fur.
My cautious companion, my
in-love-with-me friend. What will we do
without your low grumbles
your hot-water-bottle body
beside us all winter? O sun-scorched nose,
O wacky teeth that can’t bite a thing, O
fluted, veined callalily ears
taking the world straight to the heart.
There is no guy I’d rather sleep with,
no slinky tuxedo like yours.
When you frolic and hop
in your nightly routine, the sounds
of cracked glass and low howls
are like the heartbeats in a womb.
In that embryonic waterfall, we sleep.
Two lucky mothers.
O bloated bladder, O swollen,
sleepy heart. When we nearly lost you,
we sought you in our grief
to ease our grief. We held your exhausted body
to us. O seeing soul, O aperture closing and
widening, catching the landscape
of more than mere humans can know.
Beloved beast, dear body that heals and heals.
Tiny horse, honeyed contralto,
our leaping, whiskered seal —
Fiction • Fall 2025 - Diagnosis
W E The People entered the home of the Crisis Actor illegally. This is true. Why deny it? We certainly weren’t going to be invited in. There was the matter of him knowing our faces, from those days when we picketed on the gum-spotted sidewalk or confronted him at his car in a parking garage downtown, our accusations drowned out by the scrape of skater boys. And, of course, there was the restraining order. Legal lines had been drawn and, yes, we decided to cross those lines, which resisted no more ably than strands of cobwebs stretched across a basement doorway.
The fresh online pieces we experiment with outside of our print cycle. Formerly known as Blog.
Notes
The purposes of this review are twofold: first, to convey the eminently pleasant though not necessarily intellectually stimulating experience of seeing The Light in the Piazza at the Huntington Theater; and second, to convince you, yes YOU, the member of the Advocate reading this (or honestly whoever else) to take up my mantle of reviewing shows at the Huntington now that I have graduated.
From the Archives
Fiction • Winter 2019 - Double
Ahead of me in line a man starts to cough and the hacking splutters out of control until there is blood on the floor and the guards lead the sick man away. Edward might have been able to tell them whether it was a tubercular cough or a cancerous one. Either way, I suspect the coughing man doesn’t have long. Have you eaten? Edward texts. Have the guards given you anything to drink?
Features • Fall 2024 - Land
Fredric Jameson passed away at the age of 90 on September 22, 2024. Renowned as the Knut Schmidt Nielsen Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke, Jameson was a profoundly influential figure in Marxist literary criticism. Jameson studied continental philosophy under Erich Auerbach and Paul de Man when the winds of Anglophone academia were still blowing west, and produced a body of culture criticism in the Western Marxist tradition that would culminate in The Political Unconscious, published in 1981. His next major work Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism has become even more salient to our present day understanding of the commodification of time, space, and culture. Jameson was an ambitious and prolific critic: his analysis spanned the gamut from architecture to film to novels, and even in his final year he published three books, Mimesis, Expression, Construction; Inventions of a Present; and The Years of Theory.
Poetry • Fall 2018
The way my doctor goes about it
seems to allude that anything is a well
some distance from total drainage.
It is true that my body has endless
things to say to you who touch me
through the sleeve of this day mist.
The earth was made too vain to consider
that any one thing must gones for another
to preen. All of the parts of me keep
reaching like mimosas for touch
and killing themselves. In the last of my most
hopeless weeks in Boston as it was slow
wintering my only pleasure was to drink
glass after glass of orange juice by myself
watching what could have been the end
of my life. But I don’t think I can ever
be finished; I’m in love with far too many
countable things. And there are all their names
to learn. Whatever you say I’ll plant
a thousand flowers to retaliate. Always
you want to be special in your nothing
but there is the pail of your body working
against its own current insisting
with unweary voice there is no end
just water on water on water.
Poetry • Winter 2020 - Feast
If I had faults to speak of they would be
That I’m bad at pretending to be working.
Summer is meant to make you sweat and if
Your skin isn’t sloppy enough you best pack
Up, leave earth by latest May. I don’t think
You would need to sweat in space because
There’s no one there to tell you to. Here there
Are pools on earth, mostly lakes, and some
What oceans. Slacking off at work, I found
Myself watching footage of the moon landing,
With arrows showing wires pulling men across
The so-called “moon.” Accidentally, my sound
Was on. There are parts of the ocean so deep
They make a noise like high, the highest thing—
And my boss once told me her dad believed
He picked up, from his radio, the distress calls
Amelia Earhart sent before she died. So I’m wide
With apology when she hears about the moon
Landing, across the room, having happened
"Here on earth." I didn't want you to find out
Like this, I tell her. Now there’s nowhere to go.
Fiction • Spring 2023 - Decoy
Edited by Talia Blatt
Allegra Goodman is an American novelist and short story writer based in Cambridge, MA. The fiction board of The Harvard Advocate hosted her in the Advocate building on 21 South Street for a conversation about Jewishness, children, her time at Harvard, and her most recent novel, Sam, which was published this January.
2026