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July 12, 2023
The Bad Patient | Fake Illnesses, Illness Fakers, and the Problem of Medical Testimony
B.D. McClay
In July of 2022, a woman we’ll call F. logged onto Instagram and posted a selfie from the hospital. “Just been told I’m on life support for my blood pressure,” she wrote, tagging the post with various medical terms and conditions: #gastroparesis, #addisonsdisease, #pancreatitis, #fullbowelobstruction, and even #lifesupport. Three days later, she said she was out of the I.C.U. but still struggling. By September, she was dead. A scroll through...
July 11, 2023
Customs / Psychological | Fiction
Angelo Hernandez-Sias
CUSTOMS Julio was halfway through a text to Deja when the guard scanning his passport ordered him to follow. It was a slow, excruciating text, typed into the phone bought for him after the mugging, a brick, eight bucks, courtesy of the Foundation, i.e., one blue-eyed program coordinator who had taken pity on him, him and Sadiya both — Do you need a new one, the coordinator said, come with...
July 12, 2023
An Offer You Can’t Refuse | How a Mob Statute Metastasized
Piper French
For Shani Robinson, an activist and former educator in Atlanta, the ongoing racketeering trial against the rapper Young Thug and his record label YSL has occasioned a strong sense of déjà vu. Robinson has been ensnared in her own RICO — Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations — case for a decade now. Along the way, she has become a reluctant expert on the statute, but back when she was first...
July 12, 2023
Privilege of Bleeding | Poetry
Kim Hyesoon
A child humiliated by their friend came and talked to n’t. Please take me to a hospital. But n’t told the child to go back and take revenge. And the child said, I am bleeding inside my head. Please take me to a hospital. Everyone bleeds inside their heads! answered n’t. Underneath pure white quilt between pure white walls, Exercising the privilege of bleeding, A child lay still wanting...
July 12, 2023
Picking up the Shards | Why You Should Listen to Bret Easton Ellis
Gabriel Jandali Appel
For the most part, when I hear someone use the word “autofiction,” I stop listening to what that person is saying. Wikipedia defines the term as “a form of fictionalized autobiography” (which could describe, oh, say, half of the Western canon), before specifying that for autofiction to be autofiction, the main character ought to have the same name as the author. I guess people throw the term at Karl Ove...
July 12, 2023
Californian | Poetry
S. Brook Corfman
after Brian Teare, for Hillary Except dew of morning no rain marks the shoulder, relaxed into neon. Drought is a specific kind of lack, rough to touch, translucent, but we pay in many ways for grass. I like information, and you liked when I thought in my poems. The edge of a hand shielding an eye and the pupil simple as a carnation opens or lops off, heavy and...
July 12, 2023
Semi-Unintelligible | Poetry
Isabel Galleymore
Restless with deserving, I’d bought myself a kitten. Semi-unintelligible, she was primed for fable. I could caption her with anything. Though mostly what I wanted was to dress her as a lion. If you like this, then you’ll like that ads frequently addressed me — and I knew it to be true — my lungs forever doting on this specific breath, only to swiftly discard it for the next...
July 12, 2023
My Prince | Fiction
J Petersen
For a minute we sat and we watched the starlings flit. There was more atmosphere than there were things to block the sky. It wasn’t beautiful. It was plain, so it was beautiful, the way a flour sack is beautiful, or a cloud. It was like the birds weren’t getting farther away or moving closer. It was like they were getting bigger and smaller, that’s it. We were by the...
July 12, 2023
Have You Heard This One Before | Fiction
Mariah Kreutter
My ex-boyfriend had a joke that went like this. He called it a joke. It was really more like a story. Here it is: So there’s this guy who, one night, someone breaks into his bedroom and rapes him. The rapist is really quiet, really efficient. He doesn’t leave a trace: no DNA, no signs of forced entry. He’s pretty considerate, actually, uses lube. Uses a condom. Totally blindsides the...
July 12, 2023
Revelation | Poetry
Zaynab Bobi
When the doctor said to your mother, She walked out of the clock I painted three scenes: First, your breath went anti-clockwise: the hour hand walking backwards until it was swallowed by time. Second, you crossed out of time with the minute hand stuck between your teeth — night had slipped into your mouth. Third, you drained your mother’s chest and poured yourself into it; swinging back and forth...