Masthead

Editors-in-Chief

Leon Barros
Natalee Cruz

Editorial Directors

Stephanie Berger
Jackie Braje
Tova Greene

Readers & Editors

Lisette Boer
Fi Makris
Faith-Marie McHenry

Editor’s Note

Dear Readers,

Recently, someone was walking along the Oregon coast when, in the distance, they spotted an unidentified black mass on the shore. As they got closer, they came to realize it was a carcass. Strewn upon the sand laid a lone angler fish, her football-shaped body blackened from decay, a dried bulb hanging from her forehead. Scientists say this discovery is only the thirty-sixth of its kind; a deep-sea rarity, dredged from the ocean’s depths, a sight witnessed by only a few.

The sight elicits grotesque fascination coupled with melancholy, a visceral reminder of our loneliness and animal mortality. In the issue ahead, animals run wild. Both observed and embodied, some are friendly, some fearful, some feral—some dead. From Indovina’s lovin’ bear to Abigail Swoboda’s thrashing eels, creatures abound, evoking a primal state and offering us an experience different from our own. 

These days, living can feel like an exposed nerve, an animal body that cannot distinguish between itself and the world around it. Certainly, now, we feel this more than ever. As the indescribable violence in Rafah, Sudan, and the Congo and against citizens in Haiti and Uyghur Muslims in China rages on, the pleas for a ceasefire and humane resolution remain unheard. As Bazeed in “Palestinians, Balletic” demonstrates, it’s all too easy to fall into this quiet horror of erasure. 

So, what are we left with, and what comes next? Thinking about the angler fish, left on that shore to the caprice of the elements, it is human instinct to be repelled. Yet one also realizes the angler fish did not appear out of nowhere. 3,000 feet below sea level, the angler fish lived in a thriving world, full of its kin and other deep-sea creatures, all trying to live with each other, from birth to death, to survive.

Our contributors remind us that it has always been we who come together to stave off this existence’s cruelty, through family, community, and even through art. As protests around the world continue to show, there will always be people who will defend the right to live, and to fight for a better future, even as some continue to deny it to others. Throughout the issue, these artists speak both to and think of other people, wondering how our animal bodies, in our encounter with the other, can be a source of terror and joy, of violence and love. For all our faults, the problem is the solution: each other.

Perhaps that angler fish can teach us something too about the unknown, that there are worlds and even futures beyond our comprehension, beyond our ability to imagine. In the final lines of “Abecedarian On Surviving | Apocalypse,” Kindall Gant writes, yesterday is today refracted | in the nightmare of yesteryear / zeitgeist of an era we dream real | tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. Even that angler fish, 3000 miles above, ended up arriving at a strange new shore.

Warmly,
Natalee & Leon
Editors-in-Chief

HOW TO HELP

Palestinians, Balletic

Palestinians,
Balletic

Massive crowds,




                        of

            Israeli police beat mourners
with batons,
her coffin



            a           military raid
 
 
 
            where her body      rested

 Akleh’s coffin

            almost dropped to the ground.

  
 
 
                        crowds carrying Abu
Akleh’s coffin
 
 
 
                        a 

 
 
 
                                    Mount of
Olives,                  a family plot
 
            honoring
                                    the latest
Victim of           Israeli occupation

 
 
 
 
 
            living                            in
                        the air














            watch                i                       n
    g


From Jerusalem to Jenin 




“God is greatest,” some chanted in Arabic.






                                                           let us
                                    finish the day










                      blue, bullet-resistant



and Abu Akleh’s coffin fell toward the ground.

            the




           killing
               the chronic tension



                       deliberate         












                                                ballistic



           Israel



                       expert


                                              bullet



Palestinian                     s

balletic

Explanatory Note:

This poem is an erasure from a Washington Post article dated May 13th, 2022, with the headline: “Massive crowds, police beatings as journalist’s funeral is held in Jerusalem,” detailing the descent of armed Israeli police in riot gear, beating Palestinian mourners and pallbearers carrying reporter Shireen Abu Akleh’s coffin to its final resting place. Abu Akleh had been shot while wearing a clearly marked press vest and helmet, in a precision shot just above her eat, where the helmet didn’t cover.

The word “balletic,” ending this piece, meaning related to or characteristic of ballet, was captured in screen shot for this erasure, but has since been corrected to “ballistic” at the link, though with no mention of the revision history in the article itself.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/13/shireen-abu-akleh-al-jazeera-israel-jenin/

Ode to my Son’s Birthmark

Stork bite, angel kiss, salmon patch
of blush epidermis, pink palm print
pressed to the back of your head
& hidden until you merged
with the light outside my insides,
summer flooding the hospital room
in the city of Saint Monica, patron
of mothers & famous for cheering
son Augustine along his fraught
illustrious path & isn’t the world
just like that? Mothers versus Death
since forever as we’ve followed it
in history books & life
& certainly since you arrived
on this planet so breathtakingly
artful in its design on evils
& delights, on miracles & mayhem
& shame on us & on me
forgetting your skull cap’s masterpiece,
the field of Rorschach strawberry
where I’d plant my lips so often,
letting your follicle fragrance
fill me, a grace-given thing,
this infant essence, fecund
& flesh-scented, the bread
of stars if they could exhale
like animals, like the breath
of heaven, really, then the unseen
illness, the taking of pictures,
the requisite shearing of locks
grown long in your young
adulthood—I saw it—the good
friends flying in with their weed
& spirits, their laughter
& raucous playlists, the ceremony
of love your goofy lot performed,
first braiding then snipping
then shaving your head to its
nubby minimum so the chemo
could not get there first,
that fucking devil we’d bless
& curse as it snaked its orange
burn around your body
in the coming weeks & months
& how the shearing brought the mark
into view, the rouge kiss of a long-lost
lover peeking through your homemade
beanie knit by a family friend
from the church we don’t visit
anymore, not even on holidays
or to pray in pews under stained glass,
those ocular openings in the Neo-Gothic
vein since medieval Chartres
where divinity streams through—Oh,
you brave & worthy knight,
your body a cathedral, your bones,
holy relics humming the hymns
of coming health & weren’t we
the ones back when, always first
to the healing rail, our heads bowed
to receive the woo-woo spirit
where most were too proud
or embarrassed to kneel or believe
but we knew that the things worth
knowing are not the things we know
& when God is gone it means
church is everywhere & water
might turn to wine & stones to gold
& the greatest moment in the service
was when everything stopped
& the veil of words dropped
like a curtain of hair falling
& the people turned to touch
each other, saying Peace be with you
& Also with you, their trembling
hands a little like newborn
roses opening to morning
after the shadow of night has passed

Iele

Have you ever met girls made of antler velvet?
They are snow, they are yellowing
broth, hot throats strained by cold air.
Laughter soaked through boiled bones all
mountain sounds with joints that never thaw.

These girls are flowers drying on the windowsill,
sliced open bellies hanging in a small house soaked in salt.
The calcium white of dowry lace, the strength of
blankets locked inside a wooden box.

When you press your face into her hair you smell smoke,
animals skinned for drum membranes, a rooster spasming
above the the slosh of blood in the bowl and your grandmother
drawing a small knife across the crumpled neck with leather palms.
You watch, containing your breath between the gaps in the fence.

I have seen girls made of beast hours.
Under nights that half-whimper out in blued
sputters of campfire, boney fingers pull the furs closer.
Somewhere, there are teeth snapping at the church door

You are supposed to name your daughters after saints
but these are women born with rifles tied to their spines.
Snow-clots between the toes, these girls are a hound pack
of fever, wombed in the stories of ancient things, mouths so
argent-heavy lapping at your eyes like sparks from striked iron.

You are the beast she would like to cut open, to
crawl inside and occupy the shelter of your organs.
In my dreams, Winter is a hungry sister.
Jaws slick as honey, fastened around the kiss of your throat.

Nativity

The method of delivery defines

the type of mammal we, they, you,

are. The category of creature I am.

They are monotreme, they who are reptilian,

birdlike in their method of birth. A cracked

white shell announces their first day.

Monotremes possess cloacas. One canal

to expel excrement, urine, and the egg

that descends from within to remain without.

You are marsupial, you who clamber

undeveloped into your momma’s pocket.

Out of differentiated birth canal you arrive

to climb incomplete into her warm pelted

pouch. No one blames you

for this extra time inside.

I who am placental—food and waste

conveyed via same-serving, cloaca-like rope.

Then, cord sliced, tied: belly button bulge.

Initially conjoined, I was cut free upon first breath

alive. An entire lifetime spent nursing

such self-determining slice.

Online Dating Profiles

second womb

Nude and wet as I’ll ever be without fear of harm,

the steam envelops me. A soggy cocoon

of transient remedy. A more regulated drowning

until my breath returns, having ricocheted off the mold.

The curtain sweats out a desire sticky and lingering

as the craving your lovelessness affords.

I am trying to love the way you’ve made me

have to love myself. Permission

with no promise of return.

I open the faucet of us and nothing rushes out.

Mothering is slippery, I know. Lots of need

for grabbing on. For doing as you must.

You recount stories of your own many avoidances.

How you knew to do as told without question. Meaning

all the questions got jammed down from your slightly parted lips

to whatever organ holds the most hesitance

to your bloodstream. Hatching within me.

Now all I have are questions. My insides never dared

imagine being supple and uncalloused. So I gather myself

beneath a constrained downpour in hopes of dissolving,

imperceptibly. In hopes of seeing

what the drain has to offer me. I’d like to believe

there is a sewer for all the lamentations we’ve sloughed off

in anguished showers. A holding place prior to treatment.

Trouble with that is, all water gets recycled. Incessant

is sorrow. Foolish to think we can wade in the same waters

without repercussion, awaiting salvation.

BUSY

that summer ash ruined
the whole damn sky yellow-bellied
marmots near exterminated & the mountain
lions kept alive on kibble & water
we left outside for them hundreds no
thousands were evacuated we stayed
in cities blanketed overnight
we were dusting earth from our cars
we were worried about people
we breathed whatever fresh air
we could find we could have
saved some for later but
thank god the fire
died & we got
we were
busy

all this life PEARLS ON A STRING

kids line up

Abecedarian On Surviving | Apocalypse

— after Sun Ra's Space is the Place

aliens exist but i’m still alive | in amerikkka

backdrop blue | lives protected more than black

colonization the root of climate change | chronic

deforestation | murder purposely mistaken for death

everyday | another unnecessary angel’s eulogy

for what | seems like will but won’t be forever

generations of grief | seeking god in the genocide

hardened whelmed over by the absence | human

impatience a constant for change | the future imagined

juxtaposing an unnameable | into existing justice

kaleidoscoping science fiction into reality | karmic

light travels us through | years of life-saving liturgies

myth transforms into historical record | missions manifest

new worlds | stardust made non-monolithic niggas name

oppressed folks | their overseers reaped for oblivion

peeled from what was made into what will be | re-write present

quilt belief into the broader tapestry | resurrect it queer

revolution for the masses | a collective re-remembering

subverting middle passage | slave ship turned spacecraft

the instrument prototyping tenderness | isotope teleportation

ultraviolent for the massas who don’t make it | to utopia

virtuosic transitions to an envisioned elsewhere | liminal visions

wage war against erasure | from memory wading in water

xenial alchemy | ancestral end of awaiting a xenagogy

yesterday is today refracted | in the nightmare of yesteryear

zeitgeist of an era we dream real | tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet

hagsploitation

Too Much Dateline Won’t Kill You but Murder Sticks Will

Acrylic and Oil Pastel on Canvas. 30x36 inches.

A Nice Family Dinner in the Dark

Acrylic and Oil Pastel on Canvas. 24x36 inches.

Last call

Acrylic and Oil Pastel on Canvas. 36x48 inches.

pull tight

1) Bill sent me home with a box of cake from Veniero’s Pasticceria on 11th Street
2) I tried to convince Carla to take one of the slices, “no it's tied with string,” she
said at first, “I don’t even really like sweets,” she said next
3) I failed to convince her, not knowing her well enough to know how hard to push
4) I enjoyed the privilege of cutting in front of the queue at the zine fair
5) The ego, that perennial source of shame
6) I have a face, the ego seems to say, daily
7) I fill it with cake, with cum, with commas. I am trying to fill it with commitment,
which seems not to be my nature. Then I think I’ve been wrong about my nature,
wholesale
8) Are we, in this life, to push against our natures, or go into them with as much
depth as we can bear?
9) Would doubling down on my sort of masculine waifishness please god?
10) Or is it better to struggle against the impulse to live like a leaf blown into water,
letting anything thrash me this way and that way and taking it?
11) Which would require a more traditional masculinity; thrusting myself into the
seam of each cracking day, with impressive calves that harbor a quiet threat

1) My edges were made of pigeons’ stretched out wings
2) I was entirely penetrable
3) Calling it bravery except if I could have I might have chosen cowardice
4) The orange tone came and went like accents on the train
5) I set up everything wrong for the evening, saw faces from my past, imagined
them smiling at me and found it helpful
6) Hillary stayed with me on the phone for hours, Demo too
7) Jumi prepared to do something I wanted to change her mind about, and wanted
her to change my mind about, and found, with some horror, my mind was maybe
already bent towards hers a little
8) Betraying the part of me that moves with sewing machine precision, admittedly
ungraceful
9) Risking a chance at direct sun, water flooding lungs, ordinary pleasure, swiping
hair from The Other’s face

1) Cranes still in the sky, a heavy chain cranks not at all for the afternoon
2) Am I swaying still?
3) A baby’s eyes are sometimes just like the fathers
4) Are these things I want, suddenly?
5) Meaning more lasting than the watercolor cups I used to probe a paintbrush into?
6) When people say having kids is selfish I think they often really mean having kids
is a shortcut to flattening out the creases of the begging afternoon
7) Should we not permit ourselves shortcuts?
8) Guilt residues on every windowsill along with long perished flies, is what Anna
means by “the obligated life,” the one we risk moving out of in order to really live
9) Should I stop recalling laughing with you in my mouth hardly?
10) Would that be a greater risk, than forgetting?
11) “Risk” in this turning is twofold & opposite; the risk of losing something you need.
The risk of losing something you need to lose to gain what you need even more
12) I want simply to be in the service of even more life
13) I thought of deludingly, craning my neck for another line

1) I did not notice my face slackening like mesh worn into afternoon heat
2) But bus placards offered unfriendly confirmation
3) More tabs were added to the task list by trembling hands only Hillary has held
into stillness
4) Benji’s birds nest veiled me from what I am only afforded to press between my
palms so briefly
5) Say it plainly Eirik says to Lucien and Lucien says to Sunday with an open
question
6) I promise to never again use nature to make up for my underdeveloped
spirituality, I read some version of, and pasted to my wall as a threat
7) My mom loves this long song
8) Like a bass line, you can't always know what a presence is doing for you until it
cuts out
9) Not unlike the hurricane cutting out the lights, Facile running out the backdoor
after a potent line
10) I hollered after him, barefooted, I recall
11) Please, please don't put that on the bright marquee

ode to the bear

Fuzz and mass as he
Tramples through his wood

Unabashed
After hibernation

His mellow tidings

Sauntering on all fours

Fur untamed
Unbuttoned
Unfurling

Sleepy eyes as he
Jiggles his body

And yawns

And exhales

And scratches
His big belly

His biker’s bliss

With stocky limbs

He lifts himself up

Rubs his back
Against a tree

Can’t reach back there
But who cares

When he’s the biggest
In the land

Someone will come
And undo him

With their sharp claws
And masseur grip

Feeling the way he
Moves at the waist

As he rocks

Back
and
forth
Against
the
bark
His
dance
all
Mo-
men-
tum
His
dance
all
Hypnos
with a
lullaby
at the end
of his spine

he licks his lips

as he gets off

his huge

haunches

heavily

heavenly

hungrily...

I can never keep up with him.

Long E

The podcast guest pronounced it queerulous
and that long e turned my mind to mischief,
or mischievious, a misspelling born in the mouths
of 16th century English, kissing its way to my own.
But I’ll text it properly: Look how mischievous I am.
Squirming in my chair, primed for teeny harms
and discomforts. Later she sends me
a screenshot of my name in her phone, spelled so
that the long e is clear, a sound that doesn’t
correspond to its phonetics but to Midwestern ears—
The way I say pink sometimes and it feels
better, pinker. Meanwhile, I’m sinking into
the torturing hour between texts and dates, one week
of NRE’s strange fire stoked and spent on phone banks.
Hang up on me. Hang upon me. Here and here.

Sweetgum

The friends I had at nineteen are all blocked on Facebook now but

Song of the Eel

1

The season of Hell is shifting
from Fire to Water.

2

Across a fathomless ravine, we all watch
as our new city builds itself slowly.

3

The skyscrapers that were once
there have begun to sink back into the ground;
now, a walled stone city is emerging
in their place.

4

The construction of this stone 
city is driven by an immense orgy
that hums at the edge of the city.

5

Incest heats the orgy that is the engine
of our slow creeping into the past;
cousins embrace cousins; brothers
embrace brothers; sisters embrace
sisters; all bodies are 
slick & pink.

6

I walk out to the edge
of the ravine to see the tops
of the sunken skyscrapers;
they have almost entirely absorbed
back into the dirt.

7

There is a man there, at the edge. 
He sits cross legged on the deserted road
that drops off into nothing at the ravine.

8

The man does not move; 
he is unaffected by the shifting 
seasons. 

9

I come back day by day, to the edge.

10

I see the skyscrapers sink & sink,
until they have never been
at all.

11

The man does not move.

12

The orgy rages.

13

The stone city emerges
fully from the past.

14

Then, the season of Hell shifts &
the ravine fills with water & becomes
our bridge to the stone shelter of our past.

15

We all celebrate the season
of Water & we prepare ourselves
to cross over to our new home.

16

The water between us & our stone city
churns & crests. Where it is not white,
it is a blue that is almost black.
The water is filled with eels. 

17

The eels in the water thrash
in wild shapes at the surface.
The eels appear to us only in parts:
a fin; a tooth; a gleaming eye.

18

We begin to cross; we are still
able to fly, but it gets harder as we get farther
along. We get closer to the water as we go.

19

When my toes begin to skim 
the water, a concrete median appears
in the middle of the passage.

20

The concrete median bisects the water
parallel to the two sides of the ravine,
splitting it into two equal halves.

21

I rest my body on the concrete median;
I watch the eels thrashing in the water;
I am now alone.

22

I can no longer fly.

23

As I swim, the eels twist & turn against
my body; their electricity prickles my skin.

24

I reach the other side of the ravine.

25

On the other side, there are two archways;
both lead into the same restaurant.

26

The restaurant has orange walls
& wet tile floors. Someone waits 
behind the counter at the end
of the hallway. 

27

I pull my body out of the water
& enter through one of the arches.