The Woman’s up in the treehouse, The Stranger can’t go back to work until he makes sure The Girl is alright, and The Girl just wants to bury her brain. She’s great at playing, she knows, but she’d be better if her brain didn’t make her say things.
Issue 34: Editor’s Note | Jivin Misra
This editor’s note was included in our print issue, published in May 2019
Two Poems | Tobi Kassim
Your Daily Mixed it’s okay the aggregators have mademany mixes for me in my father’scloud i am algorithmically relatable. there’s some familiar stepsand setlists to the ways i’m finallyreducible. impossible to resist i’ll itchto let it play automatically. be knowable for days. i […]
Work Vacation | Joe Eichner
Things were changing around the office. We had to adapt, they said, to high velocity change in the marketplace. Rapid innovation was necessary. Customer experience paramount. Engaged employees a must. All of us a part of something, all of us human beings. They brought in a ping pong table. Put […]
An Interview | Susan Choi on Adolescence, Memory, and the World of Arts Education
Susan Choi’s new novel Trust Exercise, a National Book Award Finalist, is a brilliant, inventive, and deeply thought-provoking exploration of the ways in which we tell our stories and the inherent tensions between individual and collective experience.
Two Poems | Margaret Wright
Margaret Wright works, walks, and writes in Brooklyn, NY. She has received a Martin A. Dale Fellowship from Princeton University and a Monson Arts residency.
WOUND/INTERNET | Ally Harris
By which a man possesses or enters silence. Sometimes to be a hunter to language, his animal loneliness a blood ivy, sentient & oracular & a stalk’s clean break, soft and audible. Sequestered in water, attended but also severed, aroused. Heady as droplets on moss after drought, a man squeezes […]
Excerpt from The Call-out | Cat Fitzpatrick
from The Call-out Fortunate autumn. September rushesOver our heads. Migrating flocksOf warblers, jays, petrels, thrushes,Come, then leave. The equinox,When the sun aligns with the equator,Passes. The dawns start coming later,The sunsets sooner. The sudden rainsDon’t last for long. The warmth remains.Goldenrod blooms, and even the rosesAre hanging on, this late in […]
Bull, Matador, Elvis, Mother | James Chrisman
1 A bull and a matador. Nobody mentioned the painting. No one even asked Virginia what trash heap he’d dug it out of. By the time I noticed it, I was on my second or third boilermaker. I’m more embarrassed saying this than you are hearing it, but the bull […]
In the Style of Our Adornments | John Gallaher
It’s time to get serious. As in, these Breaking News storiesare getting monotonous, like a meeting agenda, or an air conditionerclicking on and off, a band practicing one room over, lists of the dead. I’m sorry and small, while along the west coast, romantic poetsare watching sunsets through clouds that […]
Now/here Fast: An Interview with Chris Campanioni
The hybrid writer discusses his latest book, the Internet is for real, and new horizons for identity in the digital age. Chris Campanioni wants to know if I think his newest book, the Internet is for real, is productively excessive. The request surprises me—not for its candor, but for the […]
New Site Illustrations by Jean Miaochun Zhang
Jean Miaochun Zhang, who illustrated our 34th issue (out now), has provided new work to be featured alongside our online content! Find a few of her illustrations below, and the rest throughout the site! Jean Miaochun Zhang is an illustrator, writer and graphic designer from Beijing, China, who is currently living in […]
Two Poems | Nora Claire Miller
The Hernia a girl came to my house but I had a herniaI showed her how to make me calmthe buttons on my head to presslittle knobs below my hairlineshe opened the windowbut I had a hernia so couldn’tget my breathing right we stayed up all night touchingthe knobs on […]
An Interview | Danniel Schoonebeek
Over the past few years, I’ve seen Danniel Schoonebeek read three times, mostly from poems that appeared in his book Trébuchet. At every reading, I got the kind of spiritual and political catharsis that I’m always looking for in great writing. In both American Barricade (YesYes Books, 2014) and Trébuchet […]
An Interview | Julie Orringer
Julie Orringer is the author of two award-winning books: The Invisible Bridge, a New York Times bestselling novel, and How to Breathe Underwater, a collection of stories; her new novel, The Flight Portfolio, tells the story of Varian Fry, the New York journalist who went to Marseille in 1940 to save writers and artists blacklisted by the Gestapo. All her work has been published by Alfred A. Knopf, and her books have been translated into twenty languages. Her stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Granta Book of the American Short Story and The Scribner Anthology of American Short Fiction. She is the winner of the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children, and is at work on a novel set in New Orleans.
Playing | Joseph Cardinale
I wasn’t getting anything done. And I was working all the time. At least I felt like I was working. Everything I was doing felt like something that someone else was telling me to do. But no one was telling me to do anything. And that meant the voice that […]
The World Is Cancelled | Shaina Yang
“The World Is Cancelled” 2016, 4ft x 3ft, oil, acrylic, charcoal, graphite
Queer Party | Shaina Yang
Shaina Yang is a multidisciplinary visual artist with roots in California and Taiwan, now based in Brooklyn NY. They are interested in the stream of consciousness, family superstitions, and the collective mind.
Two Poems | Tyler Morse
Back and On Down Okay so I’d buried her body in a shallow graveand told mom we couldn’t go back to the cabinbecause I’d never fed the dog & let it die but it wasthe woman. And had struck her. With shovel maybe.A tussle. Thinking you know when you molest […]
Textures of Light and Shadow | Barbara Paulus
Barbara Paulus is an artist, writer and photographer living in New York. She studies film, publishes zines and binds her own books using thread and beeswax. To this end, she is learning to keep bees.