Issue 39
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WARNING: The International Apophenia Society
by bart plantenga
Apophenia is the tendency to misperceive connections & meanings between unrelated things; a disorder exacerbated by our times, by social media, by our perceived lack of agency, & by our devastating conviction that over-consumption comes with no environmental consequences.
I came across artist Alisha Sullivan’s work. Her “In Place of a Better Version of Ourselves” consists of photos of mysterious megaliths placed in a residential setting. She describes them as “inflatable voids” with the dimensions of an average human being … I found them ominous, ghostly, intrusive & I wanted to give a voice to the hapless &
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Where You Are Now
photo collection of the author
by Eric Roy
One night we went to sleep and in the morning you had turned into a body-shaped pile of mystery books lying next to me. I figured I’d make us some coffee, come back, and take a look again, but soon as I left the room I understood something was very wrong. I was inside my childhood home, and worse yet, I was alone, no sign of my parents, the family dog, or any activity at all. I brought a cup of coffee up for each of us,
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Purity
"Stir the Waters" painting by JoAnneh Nagler
By Patricia Davis
His neighbors, even their children, sitting
in the warmth of afternoon, giggled
no, guffawed at the monstrosity that rose up
in his yard. Room after room,
stall after stall. What have you
built, Noah?
What did it cost?
When the floodwaters drained
there was nothing
but the dead and an odor
that made Noah tremble.
Noah waited for the earth
to harden—waited until the animals
could step out on the ground
without sinking. -
Woman, 46
"Listen" collage by Tiffany Dugan
by Wendy BooydeGraaff
The morning of my thirty-ninth birthday, my fingertips looked hazy, as if I suddenly needed glasses. When I took off my socks (I always slept in socks, even in summer) my toes, too, were strangely abnormal. Transparent. The toes came back for a few hours on my fortieth birthday, but the day after the obligatory party, other parts of me began to fade in a spotty sort of way. My tailbone, then my left shoulder, the side I slept on. Strange, the sensation of being on the shoulder but appearing to hover above the bed.
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Jim
"Flare" collage by Tiffany Dugan
by Peter Allen
Since the beginning of term, I had been haunted by a boy at school, a boy with dark hair, pale skin, and features that looked as though they had been cut and polished out of some kind of white marble that had only the faintest tinge of warmth. Not that he wasn’t animated: I often watched him moving quickly across the playing field, or walking, gregarious, laughing with his friends as they headed off campus during a free period, disappearing around the corner of a leafy street while I lingered behind,
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Buying Cigarettes For My Dead Mother
“Hearts” collage by Tiffany Dugan
by Cynthia Robinson Young
In a time when no one would suspect a child of buying cigarettes for themselves,
a time when Ray-Ray was called limp-wristed behind his back and meaner things were said to his face, and no one ever felt the need to apologize,
but who was loved anyway because he could sing Lazarus out of his grave at church on Sunday morning, and stand on any stage and compete with anyone at Amateur Night at the Apollo in Harlem,
