“Trench art” is a term used to describe a range of objects crafted by soldiers in battle, like World War I bullet casings shaped into stippled vases for dried strawflowers, or stray World War II bullets hammered into promise rings—but for which ring fingers? Most have since decomposed.
Trench jewelry and trench vases digitally mound on eBay. But as an art form, trench art is more expansive than soldiers’ craft; it includes objects made by civilians attempting to mediate their feelings about war as bombings escalate and casualties mount. Yet another category within the form wedges somewhere between soldier and civilian: the prisoner/hostage/detainee who generates crafts while in captivity. These makers and their objects increase in number as we read these words—past, present, and future trench art heaps. Somewhere, someone cobbles a piece of old trench art to new trench art. In our rubble to come, epoxy resin will bind dust to dust.
The definition of trench art extends again, to the post-conflict repurposing of war waste by soldiers, for soldiers. A post-1950s Czech assault rifle butt retrofitted to hold a 1973 daily calendar and pen includes an engraving in Hebrew that, according to its Etsy seller, gives thanks to Shamai “for [his] service” in 1959.1 Following Shamai’s service from 1959 to 1973, does he touch this trench craft each day? When out of use (from 1973 to 2025), can the storage of this object be qualitatively described as an archive more than a crypt? These unknowns multiply. Doubled purgatories of object and human are cloaked in post-traumatic haze. The object is for sale on an online Israeli junk shop; what is clear is that no one wants it—not nationalist, not soldier, not collector, not neat freak, not pervert.2
Despite trench art’s lesser market value, its emotional value as patriotic object is assumed to be intact. The viewer’s sympathies are assumed to flow towards the battlefield fighting man who suddenly becomes artisan or artist, bundling in a critical assessment, the “personal price” of killing others. But because soldiers are terrorists to their others and heroes to their mothers, ideologies pucker at their edges to shape the reception of sculptures with a supposed clinical purpose of healing any war wound.
Author’s watercolor of twentieth-century European trench art ashtrays.
1. Fulda Gap Middle Finger
A carved ashtray in the shape of a gesticulating hand measures eleven inches tall from its base to the tip of its extended middle finger. Each digit is between two and two and a half inches thick, and the palm, which functions as the tray, is scarred by several cigarette burns. Whose hand is burnt? Who is burnt out? And what is being fingered? A clue scorched onto the wrist: “FULDA GAP GERMANY 1967–1970.” This object was most likely carved in the Downs Barracks at a US military base in Fulda, Germany.3 Its carver was most likely a member of the US Blackhorse Regiment, aka the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, which most likely engaged in combat in Vietnam just prior to being stationed in a Cold War zone known as the “Fulda Gap,” which was deemed central to the “advance of any Soviet attack.”4 Soldiers hauled small, portable nuclear warheads on and off a launch field at the base. None of the warheads was ever fired. After a while, rare birds—redwings, curlews, shrikes—clustered within this interior border.5 All carefully listened to coded messages and birdsong, bracing for the off chance that a final command to launch might arise. These are the emotional conditions that rendered the Fulda Gap Middle Finger Ashtray.
A joke that was often repeated among soldiers in the Fulda Gap reads as a bawdy, hopeless, and helpless dance score: Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye. The joke hinges on the absurd sliver of time—the duration of an atomic flash—when the grunt’s body could operate under its own authority to experience an unregulated intimacy.6 In this vocal jest, this wooden gag, nonreproductive erotics offer a potentially final salve. After duty, an ashtray that tirelessly flips the bird became a soldier’s prosthetic. But whom or what is the middle finger lobbed at? Is the gesture directed toward the Soviets? Army bosses? The self? Does the soldier feel fucked, so the antidote is to be literally fucked?7 For the anonymous carver-soldier, cold and hot war had slopped together; tedium and flashback had interlaced; trenches had merged. At present, the object is for sale.
If the Fulda Gap Middle Finger Ashtray were encased in a museum vitrine, all of its inadequacies as sculpture would emerge. If, instead, a private collector were to take a smoke break—a meditative “breather” amidst unremitting chaos—and stub out her ciggie in the palm of the old Cold War ashtray, the object would be remade again.8 She would realize with each passing moment—the increasing char of the cigarette butt, the reflections that dotted her smoke break—that she too was listening for a new Cold War.9 Has it arrived? Can the objects tell us so? I put my head between my legs …
2. Umbra Mortis
Psychoanalysts or art therapists might suggest that trench art sops up a shadow cast by the semi-operable body and psyche of the survivor. Without these therapeutic acts of making, an umbra mortis, a shadow of death, would be cast by both the maimed anatomy and the wounded pneuma. Without obstruction, the shadow would cling to survivors cycling through spastic or crumpled states. For the somatic destruction of the solider to cease, such a shadow and its sensation must occupy a material. The civilian or soldier must, by craft or art, by a gesture or otherwise, attach trauma to a substance outside of their body. Through this act, the violent density of the soldier’s own inclusion in war, their personal allotment of the carnage, can be framed, hung, sold, gifted, and ultimately, carried away. But will the umbra mortis be included?
A number of online businesses based in Ukraine ship hand-painted military helmets to overseas buyers.10 Some were unearthed in the 1950s but freshly painted in 2024. New stock propaganda images stretch across the metal domes: a battleship, a soldier in battle, fighter jets, and flags. WWII military gear is not easily reanimated and the feeling generated by these objects is more flat than gory. The Etsy shop SouvenirsUkrainean, operating as a fundraiser for the war effort, sells recently worn Russian helmets from the battle of Donetsk, emblazoned with skulls, ravens, weaponry, and women painted in a style associated with heavy metal music. The stock languishes; only sixteen sales.11 Is it too one-to-one, for us consumers, that the process of shucking a corpse leads to depicting death on the metal husk? Are we finally arriving at the edge of what can be metabolized in war? The Etsy shop MemorabiliaGlobal sells WWII helmets, but also fragments of Russian drones, naming the abstract shapes “sculpture” when they are more accurately described as ready-mades. The seller wants the material to exit his country, and he ships to North America. War waste and online markets mesh.12
Author’s watercolor of Russian drone fragment.
In Lviv, Ukraine, a used electronics shop, tiny and old, has integrated “war trophies” into its online stock. The sales pitch for the one trench art helmet available reads: “A fantastically beautiful helmet from the head of the dead occupier. Red mulberry and the coat of arms of Ukraine are painted on the helmet. The helmet also has two through holes from a sniper’s bullet.”13
In which direction does art therapy run here? Towards which victim? It seems to move towards and away from both. The surface ornamentation of the helmet with red mulberries and the twin bullet holes exceed the visual limits of propaganda; its sales copywriting swamps commerce in cruel poetry. This object, its maker, and the seller do not ask for the psychological holes to be mended. Unmended, the object remains charged, and rage flows as intended.
3. War Crime: A Clay Replica
In 2016, I remembered a friend telling me that his lover, a lawyer, once interviewed war criminals imprisoned at the Hague. On arrival, the lawyer found the cells empty because the prisoners were in the art rehabilitation room. There, the lot of them, hands muddy, made clay replicas of their penises. In response to this story, I made a series of approximate replicas to stand in for the imprisoned war criminals’ cynical approach to making amends for the genocide they had engineered and carried out. My trench art mimesis aimed to broadcast the inadequacy of restitution at this scale. I’ve since lost track of my sculptures, and the original war criminal prison phalli were never documented or archived. My sculptures and theirs overlap in having all been misplaced. Yet I also know that everywhere, just outside of legal frameworks, a swift economy of actual prison artifacts and battlefield trophies persists. All collectors—melancholic patriots, history buffs, or amoral perverts—believe in the power of an object to coagulate legacies, marshal energies, and instigate actions. Golem-like, these collectors pursue affective hyper-objects, but to what end? With or without referent, is one of these lost phalli buried in someone’s rectum? Is another playfully mouthed by a subservient fascist? Unfired, does it melt in the beta male mouth?
Confronting trench art can be a way for civilians to face our imbrication with arms dealers, politicians, and generals. Another approach would be to decorate an architectural environment, such as newly a built condominium unit, with trench art handicraft. Such a fictive request would collapse emotional distance, but also demand that, for example, US citizens test the limits of personal accountability by managing their own war waste. As of February 2025, there are “forty million tons of rubble, containing human remains, asbestos and … unexploded ordinance” in Gaza.14 Sixty-nine percent of the weapons used by the State of Israel to generate this war waste originated in the United States.15 How might the US extract and reabsorb 69 percent of the forty million tons of war waste produced by the arms the US government provided? How many Airbnbs decked out in trench art handicraft would it take to accommodate this volume of matter? Who would craft this unholy amalgam? Who would sieve from the waste the enormous number of humans denied burial?
By imagining the citizen body as an archive or repository for holding a portion of the trench art produced by war, the hope is to tip the public towards active peace. What public would accept funding battles and their gory aftermath if they had to make space in their homes for the material remains of wars, present and future? What public would be prepared to architecturally and corporeally host these objects thrumming with grief? My war-criminal dildos, and this reductive thought experiment, occupy a category of uselessness similar to the Guernica so often evoked during conflict.16 Depictions of carnage have ceased to spur a population to actively stop its government from waging war.17 Instead, amongst over forty million tons of war waste, we might realize another kind of end: a collective burial in trench art, like the farmer sucked into his silo, drowning in his own grain.
4. The Peach Pit, a Carving
A US Civil War soldier in a battlefield trench eats a peach; the pit in his mouth-trench; his body in the trenches.18 This is before the seed dries in his pocket and before, in downtime, she carves it into a pocket sculpture.19 In war and in love, seeds and humans morph. They are commanded to carve up other people, as soldiers and surgeons, or carve the fruit in the gaps, between battles. The soldier as artist and lover and eater can only reach the pit after all the fruit’s flesh has been devoured. Peach juice drenches the soldier’s chin and chest. Fruit, soil, and bone are shattered in sequence and the formlessness of blood and mud and juice is salvaged when the living recover the pit.
Burning the Dead Horses Near the Peach Orchard (1862) initially appeared in Leslie’s Weekly, a nineteenth-century US news magazine. After the Civil War, perhaps because ripe fruit hung from the branches on the site of this battle, veterans purchased dried or canned peaches when returning to the site. Today, reenactors perform combat amongst sterile ornamental peach trees, planted and tended by the National Park Service. Counter to this illustration, a historian of orchards, William Kerrigan, writes that after troops withdrew, “forty-eight dead horses remained strewn about the orchard, swelling and decomposing in the summer heat.”
The carved pit is an art object, sometimes categorized as trench art.20 It can be trafficked from one mouth (the soldier-carver) to another mouth (the lover’s). As a kiss made material, or a caress to be transferred, the carving passes across siege and into civilian hands. Alone, does the recipient—the homebound lover—pop the pit, or rather insert the sculpture into their mouth, letting the carving rattle against their teeth, their tongue seeking out the smoothed ridges and the grooves in the wood, to taste this heart-clit proxy or unloosen a spirit wedged?
The carved pit was freighted with more than simply being a proxy for a kiss or a miniature urn. It is a secular hostia, transubstantiation as the Vatican unbound.
The lover’s mouth is a sculptural tool but also the serving implement, what transfers the sacred matter of fruiting trees to the pedestal of the recipient’s mouth. A mouth is a wet atrium, a site on the verge of US stateside consecration. Today a vigilante in a holding tank thinks he can suck his secular and portable USB drive clean.21 But what is “stateside” in a civil war? How can sex, or anything for that matter, purify a sniper’s bod, a soldier’s necklace of teeth? Both operate in the aftermath, the pause before the roar (of war) and the end (of peace). Stark reportage of war crimes yields little change and this reporter gives way to oblique communiqué:
That a mouth is a trench.
It is hard to believe this when you are young and frenching—trench to trench—tongue in training.
T(f)renching—we can barely breathe and so begin to breathe together, re-servicing our holes for communal means.
It isn’t sustainable for more than a couple inhalations. Puff. Puff. We must come apart.
The pocket sculpture comes to the lover because they are apart if not blown apart.
Carved peach pits and walnut shells (circa 1861–65). During the US Civil War, these may have been carved in the trenches or they may have been carved in prisoner-of-war encampments. Incarcerated as a prisoner of war in the Confederate Libby Prison from December 1862 through January 1863, a northern shoemaker, held with over a thousand others in a converted tobacco warehouse, carved small baskets from peach pits. Later in the year, at the Battle of Gettysburg, amongst fruiting peach orchards, he lost his right arm.
Trench art charms include miniature stone bibles, hewn bullet chessmen, fragile wooden chains, and whittled walnut shells and peach seeds.22 When the peach pit dried, if the carver was not already carved by shrapnel or bullets, the pit was shaped into homely and fantastic forms: a basket for a hummingbird’s egg; a teacup with a miniscule chipmunk perched on the rim, its tail serving as a handle. These trench art carvings stud the digital collections of regional Civil War museums or scatter throughout online auctions. Within or without a museum, trench art seed carvings deaccession when leaving the original recipient’s possession.
Without context or provenance, the object is without history or activation. I text a picture to my friend, an abstract painter. She asks me if I drank from the little cup, identifying a vessel and its use when I had only imagined tasting the wood dry. Drank what? To revive the deaccessioned? A carver-soldier might operate in another imaginary, visualizing surviving Shiloh and returning to her home on the edge of Kennebunk, Concord, or the Gungywamp.23 At reunion, her homebound lover repeatedly dips the little carved mug in the cyprin to slake her soldier’s thirst and her own.24
As I write this text, my child looks up from a book and asks: “Are you an animist?” The question might refer to the 160-plus-year-old peach pit carvings on the windowsill beside me. With the sensitivity of younger animals, the kid may have subliminally tuned in to the thrum of the Civil War trench art. I concede, “Yes.” Later, I recall that my child strips the trench art of its trench. My child is always tuning out of that sprawling form of active grief and tuning into small pleasures matching the scale of a child body: tying intricate knots, identifying minute parasitoid wasps, eating pántáo (sweeter, oblate peaches). I was the kid that always grafted fresh horror onto old grief, but my child cannot ascertain sorrow’s use. The therapeutic core of trench art as emotional processing swaps for the salve of utility—to reengineer trench waste instead of exposing raw feelings when the protective covering may never be restored.
5. Peach Ask
Some trace the cultivation of the first North American peach trees to 1571, when Franciscan monks transported saplings across the ocean to the barrier islands, off the coast of today’s state of Georgia.25 Prolific and desired, the peach reached Indigenous communities before the undesirable white soldiers and settlers arrived. Over time, and within the greater psyche of American pop culture, the actual and fetishized notion of the peach as ancient Asian symbol of immortality was successively supplanted, whether by T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (“do I dare to eat a peach?”), a swimsuit the color of white peach flesh (sported by Alabaman belle and author-to-be Zelda Fitzgerald), or by Jane “The Georgia Peach” Anderson, whose Nazi propaganda dispatches were broadcast via shortwave radio in the early 1940s. As for the symbolic order of the peach, by the twentieth century the USA compulsively hoped that immortality was commensurate with an infinite fuck.
Stairwell of the Haus des Rundfunks (Broadcasting House) commissioned by the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft and designed by Hans Poelzig (1929–31). Here, anti-communist, pro-fascist Jane ”The Georgia Peach” Anderson went on air for the first time on April 14, 1941 to campaign against the “Red Anti-Christ” and detail the “dynamic life of the Reich.” All of her broadcasts concluded with strains of the Benny Goodman Orchestra tune “Scatterbrain.”
My paternal family equates the peach with the human ass. In the early 1930s, my teenage grandmother was ascending the stairs at a fancy-dress ball. Suddenly, something gnawed her backside and she whirled around. It was an elderly military general in full uniform: “Sorry! I couldn’t help myself! It resembled a peach and I had to take a bite!” He had sunken his teeth into her buttocks. We, the family hearing the story, clutch our own asses in disgust and vulnerability, but also some pride at how the butt flares and pops, and the surface flushes, peach-colored.
Violations aside, is the peach a cumulatively charged object today or more of an average flavor choice for a pie or a gummy? Were the aged medals secured to the ass-biting general’s chest a celebration of his work to annex Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, Cuba, or the Panama Canal? Or was it more internal, commanding the troops suppressing the Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee or after, in the Apache Campaign, the Ojibwe Uprising, the Creek Revolt, the silver miner’s strike in Idaho, a rail strike in Chicago? Bleeding from her ass, can my grandmother sew the general’s medals directly into his skin? If space and time fuse, smelting future and past, it happens and it’s a happening. If war is always happening, what can we harvest, and how? Does one can a rotting peach?
6. After Peach: Foxglove Days
These days the trench we once knew has come apart. The material use of a defensive channel cut into the earth is no longer viable. When munitions are administered by agile drone, the trench cannot shield the wedged human from aerial bombardment, nor protect a living body from an electronic communication device exploding in hand or pocket. I listen to a broadcaster explain the Israeli deployment of their pager technology the same week I read an early Hervé Guibert novel, Arthur’s Whims (Les Lubies d’Arthur). Guibert’s protagonist squeezes the chest of a wild bird stuffed into his pocket until its heart pops. The senselessness is devastating. The entire book is a blitzkrieg of birds and boys, white settlers (without settlements) demonic at their own shore, imploding without any state war. But imperial wars did not cease in the early 1980s when Arthur’s Whims was penned. On the contrary, France was participating in Argentina’s Dirty War, the Western Sahara War, the Angolan Civil War, Shaba II in Zaire, the Chadian-Libyan conflict, the Corsican conflict, and the Basque conflict. The novel cannot digest. The sublimation of state warfare solicits an immersion into a murderous, lush, local surreal. But smothered in both—in the terroir and the terror—this reader jumbles current events, hoping for a personal recovery from brutal reading, whether novel or newspaper. But melted electronics coat the underside of the internet. The wild bird transmogrifies into hacked pager. Squeeze something until its heart pops.
Author’s watercolor. I tried to locate a photo by Herve Guibert featuring a blossoming fingerhut but I couldn’t. “I would have liked to photograph his prick surrounded by fragrant, pale-pink peonies,” writes Guibert. But he didn’t.
Almost a decade later, after HIV gives way to AIDS, Hervé Guibert attempts to squeeze and stop his heart with a compound derived from the digitalis plant (also known as the foxglove or fingerhut). He does this for French television in his 1992 video diary Modesty and Shame (La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur). By then France is involved in the Rwandan Civil War, the Djiboutian Civil War, and the Bosnian War. Modesty and Shame doubles up, a cul-de-sac for both plague and trench art.
At some other point before or after the video, but always in war, Guibert writes about a poison that enters with a kiss, flowing from one mouth to another. An open-mouthed make-out session ends with one mouth delivering a foxglove blossom to the other mouth.
Was Shamai helping to enforce the Absentee Property Law of 1950, a legal instrument that the State of Israel used to confiscate Palestinian property vacated due to Israel’s own aggression? Was Shamai quelling the monthlong protests set off by the Wadi Salib Riots, a series of events where Mizrahim objected to the comprehensive Ashkenazi oppression of Jewish-Arab immigrants? Was Shamai guarding the supposed “textile factory” where Israel was attempting to develop nuclear weapons with heavy water imported from Norway? What was Shamai being thanked for?
Clearly, neither Shamai nor his family desire this object or are willing to maintain tribute.
Presently, the Down Barracks site serves as an industrial park. Other vestigial cultural fragments are the local baseball team, known as the Blackhorses, and a thoroughfare, Black-Horse-Straße. Moreover, Eurodance is a globally recognizable outgrowth of Cold War–era US military bases and can be traced back to the Fulda Gap; the development of this percussion- and rhythm-driven music genre emerges just prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Milli Vanilli, the production phenomenon organized by Frank Farian in 1988, included three backup singers who had been raised on the edges of the Fulda Gap because their fathers were soldiers on base. What political insight is rendered by considering Milli Vanilli as Cold War trench art?
Talking to BFBS Forces News, military historian Lt. Col. Dan Snedeker dispels an oft-repeated myth about how the 11th Armored Cavalry got the appellation “Blackhorse Regiment.” Legend has it that the name comes from a 1924 California oil fire battle that left the cavalry’s white horses covered in soot. But Snedeker instead claims that the nickname probably comes from when the regiment was stationed on the border of Mexico and California to enforce the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. On their off time, the troops played extras in Hollywood films, where they were asked, for cinematic effect, to only ride black horses. Why subsequent generations of soldiers insisted on an alternate history might be rooted in white attachment to supremacist aesthetics, particularly blackface and its uncanny application to service animals. See →.
For a checklist that includes all bird species presently found in Fulda, see →. During the Cold War, local birders reporting from the edges of the fencing noted the presence of endangered birds not found elsewhere.
The joke not only hinges on how brief the soldier’s agency might be, but on the near impossibility of the bodily stretch. Few could contort themselves enough to kiss their own ass; even a whiff of the perineum is the stuff of fantasy. We, the powerless, glean pleasure in at least sharing that we are wise to the nature of our subjugation.
The British Museum’s secretum of phallocentric artefacts, now dismantled, provides a precedent for another possible use of the middle finger.
A pacifist archivist on an ego trip, possessed by a dream that their own comprehensive cataloging would render peace, might pause to conjure what cannot be collected: that which has been atomized.
Here smoking functions as a spatial device that clears the ground for thinking. It is toxic to be sure, but hardly registers in comparison to nuclear annihilation.
One WWII helmet, while still incorporating a rather standard symbol of liberty, gets complicated. It features two cartoonish statues in dresses celebrating, one waving a torch in the air and the other a sword. These revelers are New York City’s own copper giantess, the Statue of Liberty, and Kiev’s taller titanium colossus, Mother Ukraine. Mother Ukraine was erected by the Soviets in 1979 and was initially named “Mother Motherland.” She was intended to be a personification of Russia. The statue-chimera has since been modified to represent Ukraine, but with Russia’s invasion, could it be recycled yet again? Here too, material from one war is refashioned for the sale of propaganda for another war. This particular business was a woodshop before the invasion, and its shift in merchandise is central to its economic survival.
As of February 12, 2025.
The drone fragment ready-mades fall short of the parameters of therapeutic trench art: there is little material reflection of the seller’s shell shock, which reveals the conditions of this particular seller’s monetization. I will stop short of calling it a conceptual line.
See →. Last accessed February 12, 2025.
Fred Pearce, “As War Halts, the Environmental Devastation in Gaza Runs Deep,” Yale Environment 360, February 6, 2025 →.
Zain Hussain, “How Top Arms Exporters Have Responded to the War in Gaza,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, October 3, 2024 →.
Hannah Ryggen’s 1935 tapestry Etiopia was featured in the same 1937 Paris exhibition as Picasso’s Guernica. Ryggen’s depiction of Mussolini’s skewered head was censored but Guernica was displayed in full.
Artists invested in stopping war often feel obliged to generate graphics for campaigns that are bureaucratic and that feel incredibly dull—like a boycott, or a phone bank. They might have to conjure luminous images of war tax resistance, whether made of clay, video, wool, or oil. It is hard to “go dull”—to resist seeing something like Hannah Ryggen’s anti-fascist tapestries as a better solution. But what is measurably instigated these days by works that fall squarely into the realm of protest art—that are eventually shipped across an ocean, and strung up in a museum, and maybe reviewed? I wish to be surprised.
In order to avoid sharpshooters, soldiers burrowed into the sides of their trenches, where they could maintain a certain level of stillness, even while carving.
This flip-flop of pronouns is not just about gender expansion; it cleaves more closely to the pressure of material facts: from the Revolutionary War through the US Civil War, a smattering of females passing in male uniform fought alongside male soldiers; both ate and smoked and whittled in between successive carnage. Within the subset who lived beyond the war, some veterans reconstructed a femme surface and others remained as men, undetected within their masculine frame.
Although the trench is attributed to WWI, its European iterations can be traced back several hundred years prior. For example, see Sébastien Le Prestre, Marquis of Vauban’s use in 1673. However, this European application of the trench was borrowed from detailed reports of Ottoman trenches at the siege of Candia (Crete, 1648–69). Vauban simplified the Turkish structure. Further siege-craft genealogies of the trench stretch back even further to, for example, the Siege of Medina, 1053–54.
How many images in a vigilante’s USB will be harvested by contemporary artists? Hito Steyerl establishes the wired mainstream and contemporary art economy’s tendencies towards the poor image, and we see the resulting gallery mutations, sourced from the relentlessly casual Abu Ghraib torture pics to bacchanalian January 6 video feeds. See Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux journal, no. 10 (November 2009) →.
The stone bibles are not so much a lover’s token. A series of stone bibles were carved by a Confederate soldier while in detention at a POW prison and appear to have been commissioned by fellow detainees. Wooden chains, also produced by prisoners of war, symbolically flex between literal imprisonment and the hackneyed “chains of love.”
The Gungywamp is an archeological complex in the woods of Groton, Connecticut rife with competing archeological and folk narratives of stone structures ritually based or agrarian, Indigenous, or colonial. All is overlaid with supernatural tales and wandering Irish monk fantasies. Pricey tours of the private site are conducted by the local nature center.
Vaginal transudation is sometimes referred to as “cyprin.” It differs from vaginal fluid in that transudation is specifically generated by sexual arousal—increased blood flow and pressure instigates the passage of the fluid, consisting of water and proteins, through membrane, onto vaginal walls.
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