Hybrid
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Meds Yeghern
photo collection of the author
by Alexa Luborsky
History is repeating himself again. Perhaps you didn’t hear him the first time.
He tries to begin anew but is parched—
as in prepared to be written on.
You give him ink, an equation to keep him sated like a translation.
There is no translation for Meds Yeghern into English.
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BETWEEN THE ACTS
by Elinora Westfall
art "Untitled Portrait" by Elinora Westfall
Act One
Royal Court, London
Front row, middle seat tickets, for The Cane
Red velvet chairs
And I can’t see my feet, in the dark, but I can hear the sound
Of theatre
Of the side stepped shuffle between seats, and sweets and everyone else’s coats on the arms of chairs
Of whispers and hushes and the creak of Victorian floorboards between the clink of wine glasses
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Visible Emergencies
by Hannah Bonner
art: "Estáticos de Bacuta" by Juan José Clemente
On Saturday I celebrate a friend’s birthday which is also, coincidentally, the fourth of July. I arrive during day; I leave at the torque to night. Over cake, I speak with a woman in the middle of an acrimonious divorce. “No one lives with their husband while divorcing,” she tells me. “No one. This pandemic exposes the cracks of what we never worked on.” I say very little. For eight months I have lived alone; therefore, my cracks and her cracks are different kintsugi.
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The Moment You Cease Motion, and Into the Feathery Lightness
by Michele Rappoport
art: "El mundo de Anita” by Juan José Clemente
The Moment You Cease Motion
A person lives within an inch of evaporation. Every night you die, skin and nails soft. The heart, that feverish bayonet, pierces the practical bearing of clearness. Ice envelopes the wound. Blood loiters, wet and exposed. A vein pulses like a charm more perfect than dust in winter. And in the skin, the perfect quietude of a body close to completeness. _______ I wrote this piece with words found in The Military Handbook &
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The Backbone of the World
By Cecily Winter
art "El Salto de Rolando" by Juan José Clemente
IN THE BEGINNING loomed the gray above our heads sometimes obscured by mists of rain and snow, while across the ice steppe lapped cold saltwater from which we speared fish small and large
FOR SURVIVAL we wore leathern skins and fish scales strung with sinew even in our snowdomes where we huddled close and moaned the wind music of this land
WHEN WITHERING DEATH ASSAILED US we sharpened long bones to capture an ice floe and launched it bearing the corpse,
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World Made Flesh, and Some Nights, It Gets So Dark
by Brent Canle
art: "Solaris" by Juan José Clemente
World Made Flesh
We woke this morning to find that the world was made of flesh. Skin covered everything. Freckles stained the sidewalk. Cars weave between pores in the road. The skyscraper’s windows were the milky membrane of blind eyes.
In the buildings, at work, we entered veins and all day rushed around into different orifices having meetings, completing tasks, meeting deadlines. The streets below us pulsed as buses exhaled into the coming night air.
