Issue 35
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Consumption
photo by Joshua Coleman on Unsplash
by Philip Anderson
1.
She was determined not to feel one way or another about Dan or his birthday, so Rebecca flirted with a gay guy at the international art book fair in Berlin. She was there as the representative of Moorland Books, a small press based out of Oakland that she and a friend had founded years earlier at San Francisco Art Institute.
“What did you do at SFAI?” he asked. “What’s your medium?” His name was Bunny. He was a photographer, had gone to RISD,
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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.
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Museum of Falls
By Helen Laser
art by Helen Laser
Whoever thought to call autumn “crisp” deserves the Nobel Prize.
Imagine winning an award for a single word.
Imagine committing such an act of occult evocation that your body flies to Sweden
where there are umbels of apples
shrouded in blonde maple leaves
sequestered by hollow gourds:
their seeds rattling inside like a birthday party for a balloon child. -
Personal History of the Cherry Bomb
by Bart Plantenga
photo: collection of the author
You and I cannot believe our eyes anymore. Observe: A man on a glimmering stretch of walk in a tight, shiny suit, the kind start-up guys wear, was jimmying the lock on my bike with what could have been a hunting knife.
“HEY!” Startled, he pivoted and dashed off. I gave chase because I’d been reassured by characters seen in crime dramas that chase scenes usually end with their man in cuffs.
He was young, so it surprised me to be gaining on him so quickly.
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utopia
by mic jones
art by by Rachel Rava
a pronoun can be an emergency
exit a map an experiment
in emancipation like fire
embalming coordinateslet’s make new names what would the world feel
like if gender was understood
the way we understand
a name:
singular
subject to change
sounding different
depending on
through whom
the sound is madeamid mountain ranges
screamed like names
our genders’ echo
sublime as the valley
amplifying bodiless-ness
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“All The Fighting Parts” an interview with Hannah V. Sawyerr (poetry ’22) and an excerpt from her debut YA novel
Interview by Jonathan Kesh
All The Fighting Parts, the debut novel in verse from Hannah V. Sawyerr, is a challenging, poetic tale about overcoming trauma and learning to fight back.
The story follows high-schooler Amina Conteh as she struggles to navigate a tightly-knit community centered entirely around the charismatic Pastor Johnson, who runs the Holy Tabernacle church. When the pastor attacks Amina one night at the church, she finds herself isolated, no longer sure of how to use her voice and unable to connect with her loved ones within Pastor Johnson’s orbit.
