Online Issues
-
Wish Hair Cream
sculpture by Tavares Strachan
by Sumitra Mattai
How to use:
- Squeeze a quarter-sized dollop into your palm, and lightly massage into your three-year-old daughter’s Afro as she sits in the bath.
- Hold small sections of her hair at the roots. Gently run through them with a wide tooth comb, like your husband showed you. She doesn’t scream when you do it this way, even as you comb through the more tangled, matted areas.
- When she’s lotioned and dressed in mismatched pajamas of her choosing, sit her down at your feet with a pile of chubby legos.
-
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 &
-
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,
-
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.
-
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,
