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February 28, 2023
“There’s a Lot More That Needs to Be Done” | An Interview with Barbara Smith
The Drift
“Where would Black feminism be today if it wasn’t for Barbara Smith?” asked the organizing collective Black Women Radicals in 2020. Where indeed? Smith’s influence on Black and queer feminist politics is immeasurable. She helped found the Combahee River Collective, whose 1977 manifesto coined the phrase “identity politics,” and shepherded the emergence of the style of leftist politics that we now call intersectional. As cofounder of Kitchen Table: Women of...
February 28, 2023
Indians Can’t Fly | Fiction
Magogodi oaMphela Makhene
The blue of the water was a bright electric hue. It made sounds: clapping rain sounds, trickling ice sounds, running water; water running… rushing in cold waves and against river rhythm. Splash! Spumes exploded. Spit spray. Water breaking on the ceiling shore. The waves blocking out cries from the hose welting rubber into her back, hoarse shouting rattling something free deep inside her ear. The water blocked out the barking....
February 28, 2023
The View from Jeju | Behind Nancy Fraser’s Hidden Abodes
Nancy Ko
It is said that in Korea there is a strange-looking, fantastical creature called a bulgasari, which can dissolve iron and swallow it whole. — Kim Sokpom, 1972 Fifty miles off the coast of the Korean Peninsula, in the sea passage that connects Korea to Japan, sits a small island of nearly 700,000 people that began to form when an underwater volcano erupted more than a million years ago. Home to...
February 28, 2023
Heartbreaking Breathtaking | Poetry
Rigel Portales
Pia, Peter, or Pete thrifting truffles for Tristan, methylphenidate for Miriam & her ADHD, Angel’s HD Olympus Mark III opening to oleanders in Isaac’s isopropyl clarity, Hans handing a handkerchief over to Virgil on the verge of vomiting, Pat patting her pistil, Sol stabbing his stamen, Raisa & Ralph & Ram rising out of bed & beading sweat & Seth seeping semen, Kirsten coming out of her coma for Faith...
February 28, 2023
Summer People | Fiction
Silas Jones
“In the winter,” said the cop, “it’s the same crew committing a bunch of different crimes. Left.” He picked up my left hand like a CD he didn’t want to scratch, from the edges. “In the summer, it’s different perps doing the same few over and over.” “That must be exciting,” I said, watching as he smashed my fingertips one by one onto the blue inkpad. His badge said Officer...
February 28, 2023
Latent Heat | Poetry
Gospel Chinedu
to see in a city like this is to hoard catastrophe in the storage of your memory become a virus your psyche disturbed : distorted : difficult to sanitize in this city every boy is an isotope weighing a mass greater than the atomic mass of his original body in my mourning i drag myself to the mouth of a big hole when i open my mouth it swallows the...
February 28, 2023
Bóín Dé | Poetry
Timothy Donnelly
Little cow of god, the wattage of your red reverberates the earth, and spots of onyx nestle on its lacquer like fixed stars. Bravissima! You are red’s least loud-mouthed ambassador, paradise’s miniscule half-apple mobilized by a half-dozen legs, and under the split-open dome of you: gold-leaf wings, folded over esoterically, like dress patterns, whose thinness whispers to the near- devotional care called for to pin them out properly. Meanwhile,...
February 28, 2023
All Roll Is B-Roll | Adam Curtis Goes Quiet
Mitch Therieau
Is there anything left to say about Adam Curtis? Over the course of more than 25 BBC documentaries, depending on how you count — each an attempt to trace the workings of what he repeatedly, enigmatically calls “power” across the twentieth century to the wreckage of the present — the director has developed a sensibility so idiosyncratic that it simultaneously begs for and preempts parody. Along the way, he has...
February 28, 2023
Editors’ Note | Circling the Drain
The Editors
It’s a truism that there are no new stories, that each narrative, no matter how novel it appears, is actually an iteration of one of three or seven or twelve archetypal plots. Maybe so, but the cultural landscape feels especially grim these days. After the shock of March 2020, something like a renaissance was supposed to play out — that’s what happens, the forecasters forecasted, when the patterns of ordinary...
February 28, 2023
On Snowfall | Poetry
Joanna Klink
Some days I am so filled with myself I can see nothing — who I was, others are, what any burden meant. The nights come and go, my thoughts loosen and return, and even now I am not sure the cardinal in the empty tree is there or if I dreamed it waiting. If I walked out now into that muffled quiet, my face would cover in ice-dust and my...
