Fall 2023
Issue 29
Issue 29 features flirty game wardens, nuns in a cavern, mysterious transmissions, the world’s youngest knife thrower, the names of Argentina’s rivers, streams, and lakes, the fountain of youth, gray dawns, and ferocious appetites. It’s about war, lies and misinformation, languages and language, erasures, brutal occupations, bad reasons for enlisting, and signs that refract so deeply we can’t trace their path back to the world. It’s about sinister radio signals from the fillings in your teeth or maybe over there among the trees.
Includes new work by James Nulick, Mary Burger, Denis Tricoche, Yuliia Iliukha and Hanna Leliv, John Gu, Iliana Vargas, Lena Greenberg, and Michelle Mirabella, Kelly Krumrie, Juan José Saer and Will Noah, Afsana Begum and Rifat Munim, Michael Loyd Gray, William M. McIntosh, Laura Zapico, Stella Vinitchi Radulescu and Domnica Radulescu, Skye Gilkerson, Adam Day, Ariana Den Bleyker, Justin Vicari, Rebecca Macijeski, Cletus Crow, and Ayshia Müezzin.
On the Destructive Nature of Lava
James Nulick
“What are you looking at? my sister asked in the loudest voice possible, the abruptness of it as shocking as hearing the metal-on-metal screech of ghetto brakes when one is entering a crosswalk. Jesus Christ, Nicole!?”
About the About
Mary Burger
“Story is, you come up over the rise and the coastal meadow spreads out in front of you all the way to the cliff, the grass bends in waves and the water beyond it is a steely rippling sheet.”
I am writing the dream
Stella Vinitchi Radulescu
Translated by Domnica Radulescu
“I am printing on paper in golden letters
the flights
the passing of hours
the growing grass and the secret”
and the night begins
Stella Vinitchi Radulescu
Translated by Domnica Radulescu
“whistling at the door — frost
frost
: at other times the seagull
the filth of the gray dawns”
and finally, life emerging
Stella Vinitchi Radulescu
Translated by Domnica Radulescu
“from its shell the golden sand—
what rapacious
dream
troubles my solitary
cold”
Ellipse, D.C.
Denis Tricoche
“When me and Papi get home, Leo is half asleep waiting for us. He says, Veronica came by to give you something, but she told me I should only give it to you when you’re at your lowest. Not yet, I tell him.”
Excerpt from My Women
Yuliia Iliukha
Translated by Hanna Leliv
“A woman who learned how to live in the homes of strangers lost her own home twice. It all started in 2014. Weird thugs with tricolors; mad old women with golden teeth, tugging her clothes and spitting on her. She quickly wiped their spit away as if it could seep through her skin and poison her.”
Letter to the Soil
Skye Gilkerson
“Back then you were the surface, the floorboards beneath carpets of sage and bluestem, a row of graphite scratches at the bottom of the drawing.”
A Flight
Adam Day
“They are perfecting
the pillow with which
you are being suffocated;
now it sings to you”
In the East
John Gu
“When the offensive came, I was reminded of Mahmiin Andeyin’s words to me the previous winter: ‘Before the summer comes, they will start bombing again.’”
Fire Trances
Iliana Vargas
Translated by Lena Greenberg and Michelle Mirabella
“‘Stop talking to me in French, Lucille, as if you had no clue who I was, or what’s going on. You’re the one who went to get me from the convent. You’re the one who paid for all the damage the Mother Superior and her following say I caused, even when you knew it wasn’t true.'”
The World
Ariana Den Bleyker
“A new day is forming in the kind
of sky or ocean or plain
where you can see the edge
of a dream in all directions
& it opens to you, & you let it in”
Concentric Macroscope
Kelly Krumrie
“I recorded them in the kitchen, changing clothes, washing their hands, played the sound back, and they’d write it down somehow, rerecord it. The echoes under there had to be god.”
Autumn
Juan José Saer
Translated by Will Noah
“In its essence, toponymy represents the first verbal constellation to spread over the tortuous surface of the universe, verbal projectiles that are launched by man’s codified breath and become lodged not in places themselves but in the maps that serve as their emblems.”
What We Held in Common
Justin Vicari
“Some people, by mere overlap of luck,
Guessed at parts of your soul by looking
Into your eyes, so you thought and sought
To hand them back a key. “Open me up,”
The Shame of Loving Another Poet
Justin Vicari
“I gather his drafts to read in bed.
His language is sexy but cannot be
Held like a man.
Lately, his heart, too,”
Pen
Afsana Begum
Translated by Rifat Munim
“Had anyone ever heard of the spirit of a discontented ghost wandering through the packed streets of an old book market when there were so many other places to haunt people? Just like there were bookworms, there were book ghosts, too.”
How to Keep Going
Rebecca Macijeski
“Let me tell you again. A new day is a new world is a new mind. There are a few constants: cerebral cortex, Irish breakfast tea, the way window light makes wavering star maps across the too-tired skin of my hands.”
How to Lose Your Fear of Death
Rebecca Macijeski
“Perhaps I’ll eat everything. Perhaps I eat everything and the hunger remains. What then? What more can I put in my body put in my mind put in my heart before next thing I know I’ll want the whole town on a bed of lettuce, my family tree deep fried.”
How to Paint the Sky
Rebecca Macijeski
“Why is the sky blue, but the clouds have so many different colors? It’s a signal question. When a child asks why is the sky blue what she means is suddenly I see the bigness of the world all around me like a thicket of knowledge I can’t get to the center of.”
The Game Warden
Michael Loyd Gray
“He’d come nosing around on Saturday afternoons, this tall, red-headed warden, because he’d taken a shine to my mother and pretended to recruit me for the conservation service. Even then, I suspected that was a front, but my mother and I were dazzled by his grin and jutting chin, a man full of the outward confidence a smart green uniform and holstered pistol on his hip bestowed.”
Current and Former Associates
William M. McIntosh
“I know it was a long time ago and I know we don’t see each other or speak anymore, although we could, and I know you’ve got a lot in your life and so do I, and I know this sort of drifting apart thing is rather common and forgivable, but do you remember me? Do you think about your old life while you’re possessing my current one?”
Eternal Life
Cletus Crow
“Methuselah died
at nine hundred
and sixty-nine, which
is enough if
only to get to know you.”
Take Care
Laura Zapico
“Micah called my name as I climbed the steps to the Oasis and he ran to catch up, sweating, his checked flannel shirt billowing behind him. I recognized him from my last rehab, the one with the low-rent organic meals and nonstop mindful meditation. We’d barely spoken there, but I’d felt his eyes on me in the dining hall and during Tai Chi, and I remembered how it thrilled me when I felt like a lonesome tumbleweed pinned against a rusted fence, blown and battered, miles from home.”
Deep Dive
Ayshia Müezzin a.k.a [ a y s h ] b.1986 is a British-Cypriot Intermedia artist who grew up in Cyprus where she attended high school and began her artistic career.