Dear reader, Earlier this summer, I went on a road trip to see some of the Western national parks for the first time. The day I drove through Death Valley National Park, temperatures reached 122 degrees. I stopped for water at the park’s visitor center, in a town aptly named Furnace Creek. Inside, I overheard…
Category: Issue Two
Mise-en-Scène by Suphil Lee Park
Added overnight is another horizon twenty degrees off the original. Skydivers are spotted a few imaginary feet above the ground after landing Migrating birds drift between lines, flapping slantwise. Night after night more horizons slit into view, crowd out the notion of horizon. Had this happened centuries ago, Columbus and Galilei would have pondered differently,…
Dog Tar by Trevor Shikaze
I swore I would never make dog tar. “Surely there are other animals,” I would say, “to capture and render in backyard furnaces. Surely we don’t need to resort to dogs.” The realists pushed back: “What are you going to catch, then? Deer? There are no more deer. Rats? Too small. Raccoons? You could…
Mexico Attacks by M. G. Moscato
Artist’s Statement “Mexico Attacks” is a series of visual/erasure works that employ old printed matter with text from the original card backs that has been subjectively processed and reconfigured as erasures. The xenophobic idea that Mexican immigrants (as well as others) are invaders that threaten U.S. national security is nothing short of absurd. (Indeed it…
I Don’t Think There is Anything Near or Far that Could Ever Fix This: a Photo Essay by Joumana Altallal
The photographs in this essay were taken by Joumana Altallal in the cities of Najaf and Baghdad between December 2019 and January 2020. This was her first trip back to Iraq since fleeing as a toddler with her family in 1998. Buried in the family vault, in chronological order of death: Kamila, Jassem, Adib, Raouf,…
In Which I Try to Save the World from Total Destruction Through the Power of Art by Emily Mitchell
The man in the apartment next to mine has come here from another planet to destroy civilization. His mission is to go to that facility in Arizona where the government keeps all the really deadly viruses and steal some to release at different points around the globe. Thanks to our modern, international transportation system, they…
Two Poems by Michael Schmeltzer
“are you ok I’m worried about You say something” —SPAM email subject line I am burning crayons in the dark.Have I returned to or destroyed mychildhood? Every color melts, especially our favorites.Who once said their bones were as soft as candlewax?Those with ears listen. Those without earslistened too much. I heard it takeseight pounds of pressure to rip off the human…
Afterimage: Artwork by Koss
These monochromatic pieces are all acrylic paintings on panel, fairly diminutive (all under 12 inches tall). I first became interested in air-brushing when I was spray-painting some sculptural objects and felt moved by the afterimage on the newspaper, the way the atomized particles suggested a thing that once was and a reference to time passing.…
Slow Apocalypse: A Conversation with Mary South
By Yohanca Delgado Mary South’s debut story collection, You Will Never Be Forgotten, came out in March, at the very beginning of the COVID-19 lockdowns in the U.S. and around the world. When we talked this summer, it was clear, even then, that life as we knew it had changed forever. Looking back on our conversation now, in September,…