Dear Reader,
This edition of MQR Mixtape is dedicated to disorder in many forms—physical, mental, medical, social, linguistic. It explores the ways we impose order on messy lives and broken bodies so we can continue to exist inside them. Casey Smith puts a needle through her navel. Daniel Pope takes a car ride with Suicide. Steve Fox stacks frozen cubes of vomit into a pile.
It’s about disorder in our environment: In Pune Dracker’s prose poems, meat falls from the sky and flowers grow from a cesspool. Zea Pippi Lotte van der Elsken writes of messy rooms and the stench of hard love. In Parisa Karami’s comic, a mother is not what she seems.
It’s about language that doesn’t follow the rules: Hailey Coulter’s sentences reflect the scattered, rhizomatic nature of grief. Philip James Shaw organizes words into a breathless new grammar.
Writing through disorder is, for many, a mechanism for healing. In her essay, “Body Images,” Kayleigh Hughes asks questions of her eating disorder through the art of Egon Schiele and Alberto Giacometti. In “balance,” Hayley Nicole thinks of bipolar disorder as dolls and decapitation.
This issue contains difficult content—suicide, eating disorders, alcoholism, and other forms of self harm. The poems and stories all address such subjects with thoughtfulness and grace, but please take care of yourself while reading. Specific content warnings can be found on the pieces that require them.
Many thanks are due to Khaled Mattawa, for giving me the opportunity to publish this issue, and to Elinam Agbo for all her guidance throughout the process. To you, the readers—I’m glad you’re here. And to each contributor—it’s been an honor to experience such brave, important work. Thank you for trusting me with it.
Sincerely,
Chloe Alberta, Guest Editor