ENTRAILS MAGAZINE is an art and literary publication made by people living with inflammatory bowel disease.
ENTRAILS wants to see a more compassionate future for people living with inflammatory bowel disease, and we want to see more art! This magazine centers the lives and experiences of people existing with a chronic and debilitating digestive disease.
Making art and writing can be proactive ways to process living in a sick body. We encourage anyone with IBD — no matter your skill level, age or whether you self-identify as an artist, writer, etc. — to submit a piece of original work. Despite its prevalence, Crohn’s disease & ulcerative colitis are highly stigmatized conditions — together we can cultivate a supportive community and build awareness through our shared experiences.
Letter From the Editor Issue 02
Imagination is an act of resistance.
We live in a world built on extraction and exploitation. From a young age, we learn that our worth is measured by our ‘productivity’, rest is condemned as laziness, and dependence is treated as weakness. For disabled and chronically ill people, these messages and realities are particularly dangerous. They live in our bodies, our relationships, and in the ways we learn to police, delegitimize, and minimize our needs.
ENTRAILS asks us to examine how white supremacy, colonialism, and ableism prevent us from living fully and freely. It calls us into a radical imagining, inviting us to reach toward and embody something that does not yet exist, while we work together to build a more liberatory future. What began as a single publication has grown into a community that feels essential for our collective survival. With each issue, more people with IBD find each other, connect, and begin to feel a little less alone. Together we are creating a place where we can feel safe, supported, loved, and seen — a microcosm of the world we want to live in.
ENTRAILS leads with Disability Justice as inseparable from every other struggle for liberation. As Patty Berne, cofounder of Sins Invalid, writes, “Disability Justice demands that we center the bodies and lives most impacted by oppression while building movements rooted in interdependence, collective care, and cross-movement solidarity.” We echo Johanna Hedva’s articulation of care as both personal and political, and recognize that the sick body is already a site of resistance.
From the ongoing genocide in Palestine to the crises in Congo, Papua, Sudan, and Myanmar, to rising fascism in the U.S., a disabling future is unfolding. Thousands of Palestinians continue to be disabled, murdered, and forcibly displaced from their Indigenous land by the Zionist entity. A free and liberated Palestine, Congo, Papua, Sudan, Myanmar, and Black and brown communities targeted by policing, border militization, and carceral violence in the United States is a Disability Justice issue because every system that treats human life as expendable fuels the same mechanisms that devalue disabled lives.
The COVID-19 pandemic is another example that made this violence visible. With more than a million deaths in the United States alone, the general population repeatedly showed how disposable disabled and chronically ill people are considered to be. Masking, a practice initially embraced by liberals and progressives, all but disappeared, along with the compassion and increased attention to accessibility that non-disabled people and spaces had just begun to exhibit. Awareness and collective solidarity dissolved. There is no access without freedom, no care without solidarity, no revolution without love. As civil rights organizer Fannie Lou Hamer said, “None of us are free until all of us are.”
And within all of this, there is rage. Disabled rage, queer rage, marginalized rage, working class rage, each of them kin to one another. Our rage is a tool for truth-telling, born from being told to shrink, to be grateful for survival instead of demanding lifelong support. Rage is the recognition that something — our dignity, our self-determination has been taken, and that we deserve to want it back. Through self-expression, we give that rage somewhere to go. We turn it into paintings, care webs, songs, gardens, memoirs, and poetry. We turn it into knowledge that grows the more we craft, speak, draw, organize, and sing with it. Ableism is not only structural. It is intimate. It shapes how we see ourselves and each other. It convinces us to minimize our needs, to apologize for being sick, to hide, to believe care is something we must earn. We internalize the violence of a system that abandons us — unlearning that way of thinking is part of the process. Staying enraged as fuel, while holding imagination as a guide, allows us to move beyond survival and dream of a life shaped by possibility rather than exclusion.
That abandonment is not only a political failure. It is spiritual decay. It reflects how far we have strayed from collective care. Imagination allows us to see these struggles as connected and to understand that liberation anywhere depends on care everywhere.
To live queerly, disabled, or queerly disabled is to build futures that do not yet exist, to make room for forms of life the world has not yet learned to imagine. As disability scholar Alison Kafer writes, “Imagining disability futures requires rethinking what counts as progress, what counts as care, what counts as a good life.” Imagination becomes a method of survival, a way of reaching toward what could be rather than what has been denied.
I hold my queerness not only as an identity but as a practice, alongside Disability Justice and anti-colonial commitments, that rejects hierarchy, values collective power, and celebrates what is unruly, emotional, and tender. Through these teachings, I have learned that there are infinite ways to build family, to love, to make art, to feel nourished. Disability, queerness, and decolonial practice allow us to rethink what life can look like when it refuses oppressive notions of linear time, productivity, or perfection.
Living in a disabled body means learning to accept that we are deserving of abundance. It means learning to ask for help without shame or apology, to freely share access needs, and to actively build webs of care and connection. We are taught that independence is the goal, but Disability Justice teaches us that interdependence is the only way we will survive. Asking for help is not a failure, it is a form of intelligence. A care web can begin with one person, one act of trust, one reminder that we are not meant to survive alone. From there it grows — little by little. When we embrace this, we begin to model a world that knows how to better hold each other.
As Disability Justice organizer and writer Alice Wong said, “The real gift any person can give is a web of connective tissue. If we love fiercely, our ancestors live among and speak to us through these incandescent filaments glowing from the warmth of memories. Loving fiercely is real time legacy building. Maybe that’s the best way to honor people.”
Imagination is how we keep going, how we turn limitation into vision, pain into motion, isolation into community. It is not solitary work. It grows through conversation, through the ways we witness and create together, every poem, painting, song, or shared story becoming a small rehearsal for the world we are trying to build. To live with illness is to continually reimagine what is possible. It is to create from the limits of the body, to adapt, to find beauty in survival. That act of creation, that persistence of imagination, is resistance. Every disabled artist, writer, musician, and dreamer who continues to make, continues to imagine, is already shaping a future where interdependence is not radical but normal. This issue is a love letter to that world in motion. To the people who show up and to the ones who cannot. To those learning how to ask for help and those learning how to offer it. To everyone who keeps building, crafting, dreaming, and refusing to disappear. We can build something beyond survival. We can imagine in practice. We can keep dreaming. We can release this publication into the long legacy of resistance work. We can let rage fuel our future. We can connect. We can insist that care is a baseline, not a luxury.
And in honor of our radical visionary DJ ancestor Alice Wong: “We need more stories about us and our culture. You all, we all, deserve everything and more in such a hostile, ableist environment. Our wisdom is incisive and unflinching.” We offer this issue as a commitment to one another, a place where imagination and care can take shape. May these pages offer steadiness when things feel uncertain and remind you that your experiences matter. And may they help you feel held by a community working together to build a future rooted in care, connection, and possibility.
In gratitude & solidarity,
Izzy Johnson