Latest
October 24, 2023
To the Watchlist | Poetry
George Abraham
a disappearing ghazal for my body, staying I get it. You’re obsessed with me. Damn the waters, now you’ll be blessed with me. When did you get this fabulous? A beloved said after reading your little profile, your unintentional publicity for me. I still hope someone spits in a zionist’s salad today, & not in a sexy way — Happy Aries Season to me! Call it what you will —...
October 24, 2023
the ghosts of the dead sea are rising | Poetry
George Abraham
from the waters] alight [with the oceans] alight [against] alight [this seasink] alight [into land] alight [of us] alight [turned robe] alight [of concrete] alight [and cement] alight [the desert] alight [bloomed] alight [into strip] alight [ma(u/l)l] alight [settler] alight [on branch] alight [of their own] alight [making] alight [they see us] alight [daily] alight [wade into] alight [beneath which] alight [o gaze] alight [o un-attention] alight [o hyper] alight...
October 23, 2023
Propaganda, Disinformation, Ideology | What the Fog of War Conceals
Erik Baker
The image of the “fog of war,” former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara explains in Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary of the same name, suggests that “war is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables.” In this way war resembles the rest of reality — a fact that McNamara perceives dimly but often succeeds in putting out of mind. “Belief and seeing, they’re...
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...
