Issue 35
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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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Tangled in Seaweed
by Yuko lida Frost
photo by Gabriel Matula on Unsplash
Let me tell you about seaweed. First, it gives us life. The ocean plant absorbs the sun’s radiant energy and carbon dioxide and in turn produces glucose and oxygen. The glucose is the nutrient all living organisms depend on. Ocean plants generate more oxygen than the world’s entire trees combined. They are our lifeline.
Seaweed is also delicious. Sze Tue wrote in 600 BC that “some algae are a delicacy fit for the most honored guests, even for the King himself.” The record indicates that seaweed has been consumed daily in Japan since the eighth century.
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Aftermath, The Griffith Park Fire
By Anders Howerton
photo by Colin Remas Brown on flickr
“Vulnerability. The ideal state of a painter. You have to cultivate it.”
– Francesco ClementeThe light has shifted since. It isn’t rushing through the glass
the way it did the day you swirled the cayenne like tiny flames
in the lemon-filled honey jar. It circumvents me now
with its set of parallelograms,kicks pebbles down my avalanche back.
You are no longer you but a ferryman instead, taking your time
to deliver me at the edge of the blazed bird sanctuary, -
Shroom Apocalypse
By Richard Schiffman
photo by Mariam Gab
After the deluge, they’re popping up fast,
a pimpled pox of pallid shrooms,puny members swell tumescent
cracking earth-egg’s humus shells,donning post-apocalyptic bonnets,
daisy chains of moonlit domes,gilled as sharks and cute as buttons,
hoisting clods of moldy duff,fungal, Mongol-horded armies,
mountain-moving mycelia,creeping up on sleeping cities,
hoodied toughs on every corner,meek and dapper Mussolinis,
squat Il Duce’s of decaycasting nets in fetid mulch,
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the cinematography of birth
By Savannah Slone
photo by Ivan Babydov on Pexels
we were all born during the slowfast shift of all things, oil on
canvas no time stamp,
among stained glass and wildlife and
a sea of velvet earlobes and disco glitter
pageantry while language swelled
into watercolor during telomere
replication and
extreme weather turned our
nothings into artifacts of survival or
remembrance and colors disappeared
underwater,
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Abecedarian
By Christina M Scott
photo by Engin Akyur on Pexels
At night, she feels for the invisible restraints clutching her throat.
Bound by circumstance, she’s unable to freely breathe.
Coveting the blade in her hands,
Death is her fateful companion.
Everyone dies alone.
Forgotten memories of better moments dance at the edge of her mind.
Guilt has set up home here in her thoughts,
Has taken up so so much space, with no intent to leave.
Inescapable shock paralyzes and pervades her fleshy shell to
Just below her rib-cage,
