Issue 31 | Fall 2024
Our latest issue finds the doomsday clock ticking down twenty days from the apocalypse. It’s chock-full of liars, the lost, and the lonely, floating in fog and hungry for cake, eggs, and kink. All that plus Allen Ginsberg, Frida Kahlo, and a magnificent tower of giraffes.
Review: Bluff by Danez Smith — or, specific audience required
Review by Jamilla VanDyke-Bailey
“In Bluff, Danez Smith (they/them) uses the full breadth of the poetic form to bring all of their complexities to a house of mirrors for an overdue conversation.”
Who By Fire
By Laila Amado
“In this story, we don’t die by fire. We don’t wake in the middle of the night to the screeching of the warning sirens on the phones under our pillows.”
Bind yourself to us with your impossible voice, your voice! sole soother of this vile despair.
—Arthur Rimbaud, “Phrases”
Latest Reviews
Featured Interview
Newest Essay
New from Joshua Escobar: Demons of Eminence
In Demons of Eminence a young traveling ICU nurse and self-described “cumdump” observes and sanctifies the friendship between an aging gay porn star and a goth chola dropout half his age, one that leads to them throwing endless parties in the industrial scrublands of SoCal’s Inland Empire at the height of the pandemic.
City. Night. Bursting.
By Tommy Dean
“Look, I know I shouldn’t be looking, but the city heat has me out on the streets, the dusty air pushed between buildings by gliding cars, windows open, soft music orchestrating their growling engines down the road, bumper to bumper, red lights sending messages to the twinkling skies, exhorting their ownership over the land.”
Mosquitoes
By Kathryn Kulpa
“Summer. Night. Your hair smells of OFF! The flat pillow smells of OFF!, the damp sheets. Still they sneak in. The buzz. The whine. The slap. Gagging a little when you see the curl of black legs, the smear of blood.”
If You Must Know
By Barbara Diggs
“You saw your lil friends drown in a whirlpool of white, one by one, or sometimes one by two like when Tay-Tay got shot during a pickup and the bullet passed through his neck and hit Raymond in the shoulder as he was running away.”
Personal Things: A Countertheme Sequence from Rilke’s Neue Gedichte 1907
By Art Beck
“Some months ago, a friend sent me a translation of a Rilke poem titled “Todes-Erfahrung,” he found in a British journal. I wasn’t familiar with the poem, and it piqued my interest enough to try my own version.”
Review: I Tell Henrietta by Tina Barry and Art by Kristin Flynn
Review by Peter Mladinic
“The beauty Barry renders in lines and rhythms, Flynn evokes in images and tones. I Tell Henrietta is about family, friends and acquaintances, and ultimately, the reader.”