Melissa Monroe’s poem offers a playful, curio cabinet introduction to the history of trepanning, the procedure of opening up a hole in the skull for therapeutic purposes.

In “Promenade,” this issue’s ekphrasis, Jameson Fitzpatrick responds to one of Chris Antemann’s porcelain sculptures, Boudoir (2011), in a poem that meditates on the ambiguities of misaligned desires and the problems of aesthetics.

Jane Yeh and Stephanie Burt double down on Claude Cahun in “Self-Portrait as a Double Exposure” and “Mondegreens.”