It’s rare to find writing that convincingly represents the world of punk—of show-going and show-playing; of earnest and eager youth; how formative and life-giving it can be to sing and dance in a room of crowded people—but the pieces published in this issue engage with music in a way that feels reliable, lived in. Jennifer…
Tag: mixtape
Editor’s Note | Work
As Andrea Abi-Karam wrote in their book Villainy, “I WANT A BETTER APOCALYPSE THIS ONE SUCKS.” Everywhere there is the proliferation of work and labour (which are not the same) and their dissolution too; capital encroaches, demands, regurgitates. It offers little in return to most and too much to a few. How does it feel,…
Lily Kaylor Honoré
Naked Ladies You and I are in a forest of the safest kind. Central stars, skyscraper-fringed, bright neon. I feel you bow-curved around my back, threaded through me, taut. Bear fur is warmest under the arms and at the brown whorl of your underbelly. Hardened strands of tree sap, amber beads caught there. The paw…
Alyson Mosquera Dutemple
Open the Window, Let in the Cool Air The aging chorus girl is supposed to take dance lessons, but instead she takes a lover. The aging chorus girl is supposed to move left-right-left, but instead she shimmies up to a fellow resident to make her intentions known. It’s Cha-Cha Night in the common room, and…
Traci Brimhall
Long-Distance Love Poem as Alt-Text [A middle-aged woman in an unmade bed poses for her phone’s camera. She takes off her compression gloves and tries again, pushing the interdisciplinary erotica of star atlas and physical therapy brochures out of the way. She studies the photo’s fortunate failure to translate pain, how it reveals only a…
Luke Sutherland
My Octopus Wife My wife and I liked to play a game. I called it the Big Squeeze, but I don’t know what she called it. Perhaps nothing. I would bring a container to her den, and she would contort herself into its shape. On stormy days when the sea wasn’t safe for me, I…
Annie Woodford
Soft, Softer A mess of rabbits, a messof squirrels. I remembertheir tiny bones, their falling-off flesh stewed in gravy.Sop it up with white bread,a salty thin savor tastingof the can of Bunker Hillbeef my granny would mixwith it and the quick heartbeatin the trees, the tremor,the brown fur, the pastureat dusk, the skin ripped offthe…
Artist Bios
Alex Romero is a New York native with roots from the Philippines. After earning his undergraduate degree from Sarah Lawrence College, he taught English in a fishing village in northwestern France. His work has received scholarship support from the Southampton Writers’ Conference and the Unterberg Poetry Center. He was awarded the 2022 Matt Leone Fellowship from Colgate…
Catherine Simone Gray
The Skin Bridge I lean off the edge of the toilet seat and sniff my underwear, trying to figure out what is leaking from me. I’ve downscaled from the postpartum mattress pads to panty liners I change every few hours, but I don’t have a name for what’s coming out of me now. Not the…
Ali Shapiro
Superstition The Beach Ali Shapiro‘s comics, poems, essays and reviews have appeared in Gertrude, Popula, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, and Electric Literature, among others. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan, and now teaches writing at the Stamps School of Art & Design. On Pleasure: “The source texts for these erasures come from…