Daniel Mrgan's cover art for Born Magazine Issue One, 2009

One of the few of its kind on the web, Born Magazine describes itself as “an experimental venue marrying literary arts and interactive media” where writers and media artists collaborate on projects. Setting aside, for now, its ideological nomenclature, its appeal lies in the interpretative dynamic between text and image.

The first project, “Inferno (Minor),” written by Gareth Lee, designed by Naz Hamid with Flash by Josh Kneedler, featured a white, naked woman. To read the text—about a man’s thwarted attempts to “woo” a girl—you click on various parts of her body. (I must say I was an unwilling participant in this media venture.) In “House Fire,” written by Allison Seay and designed by Felipe Hefler, a girl resembling a cheerful Lucy from Peanuts in both ensemble and pearls witnesses the aftermath of the fire she set to her house. She “remembered too late/the kerosene lamp, the girl who thinks the birds know the truth/it was you, it was you, they caw.” And she is to be punished. Snakes appear, “their fangs charred open” and the text as ash disintegrates onscreen. “Dhaka Dust,” written by Dilruba Ahmed and designed by Matt Pierce, utilizes the second person point of view and a grid of rickshaws to implicate us, as readers, as accessories to globalization:

Under your orna,
a laminated map and digital camera

cradled in your lap. One strand of silver
wiry by your ear. Bits of children’s songs

snag in your windpipe. Other words surface:
sweatshop and abject poverty, and you let them.

The last project, “Song of the Settled,” written by Stephan Delbos, designed by Camille del Rosario with Flash by June Baldovino, takes a domestic view of economic crisis. The poem itself is oblique—there’s a failing town on the sea, with mysterious characters planting ghost orchids and hiding in rusty sheds—but the images are stylized, whimsical replications of children’s drawings. Both “Dhaka Dust” and “Song of the Settled” complicate my response to “Inferno (Minor) and “House Fire.” I’m left with some unanswered questions, which, overall, is a good thing where poetry is concerned.