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June 14, 2022
Hollywood Tours | Fiction
Madeline Cash
Al Friedman and his mentally-ill cousin painted a decommissioned school bus to say HOLLYWOOD TOURS. They charged tourists $10.00 or ¥1,186.24 or £7.64 and drove them on a 3.5-mile loop of the hills. The price was well under market rate for the industry, said Al. He spoke to the tourists through a headset. “Kurt Cobain used to live there,” said Al, and so on. Al had been dishonorably discharged from...
June 14, 2022
A Fable | Poetry
Robin Myers
Once something closed around them like a basket and there they stayed for a long long time, falling in love with the tragic slats of light across their faces. They could see each other better now, the world gone a threat of latticed volumes past the reeds. Even then they didn’t promise anything, why would they have promised, aren’t vows meant for the giant to hear, and where was he.
June 14, 2022
Polytopes | Poetry
Kevin Holden
nephilim antiphonal twelve tone as if there could be such a thing anticomb the pollen a yellow shivering to take your seraphim & synapses the spaces between oh a raven a crow an owl show me the backside of the databarn 1 Yettabyte of brain oh come on now you would say super computer cum on my face azeotrope howling clarity or akashic field rose tone row you say...
June 14, 2022
Poem in Which I’m Called Unknowable Despite Near-Constant Nudity | Poetry
Kindall Fredricks
And fuck if all the bats didn’t just slide under the bridge like dropped wallets. So what if I have nothing to say about the vocabulary of flowers—those pinheaded gossips sunning their perms mid workday with bees sticking out of their pistils like earbuds. Every word I have to give is wrapped in tinfoil and tastes like a fridge. There are no valleys sunswept in my chest, no dreams shaking...
June 14, 2022
The Fool | Poetry
Emily Skillings
I, too, long for a cradle Of brilliant grasses Braided through with wildflowers Rocking on a historic mound That drinks the blood of men Clots of irreverent sight— A shadow spills out Of a pinprick In the form Down below on the hill The men gasp and gurgle Until they go out Their weapons flirting in the sunshine Slick with insides The grasses grow strong and toxic So goes my...
June 14, 2022
Beyond “Hate” | Evading the Carceral Trap of Asian American Grievance
Rose Nguyen
To mark the one-year anniversary of the March 2021 Atlanta spa shootings that left eight people dead, six of whom were ethnically Chinese or Korean women, The New York Times published an op-ed by Korean American novelist Min Jin Lee headlined “Asian Americans Have Always Lived With Fear.” Lee draws on the results of an informal Twitter survey in which she asked her Asian and Asian American followers how they’d...
June 6, 2022
A Star Is Born | Raffi Gessen-Gould’s Examined Life
Piper French
Social media has produced a curious phenomenon: the unwitting child star. These are kids who seem to intuitively mug for the camera without having the slightest idea of what it means to be watched by thousands of strangers around the world. Their parents have made them famous before they can really grasp what the internet is, or meaningfully consent to have their image distributed there. It’s hard to say who...
June 2, 2022
The Patriotic Hat | Fiction
Alec Niedenthal
At the end of her first life, Mrs. Cohen moved to Florida. During her first days in the state she proclaimed the beauty of everything, while inwardly hating it. She was used to the aching distance between the things she said and the things she felt; it seemed to be how she was structured now. “I can’t believe we’re so close to the beach. It’s like a dream,” she said...
January 31, 2022
What Was the TED Talk? | Some Thoughts on the "Inspiresting"
Oscar Schwartz
Bill Gates wheels a hefty metal barrel out onto a stage. He carefully places it down and then faces the audience, which sits silent in a darkened theater. “When I was a kid, the disaster we worried about most was a nuclear war,” he begins. Gates is speaking at TED’s flagship conference, held in Vancouver in 2015. He wears a salmon pink sweater, and his hair is combed down over...
January 31, 2022
My Ancestral Home, the Mall | Lil Miquela's Post-Racial Society
Kim Hew-Low
Last June, faced with the prospect of turning nineteen for the sixth time, Miquela Sousa suffered something like an existential crisis. From the bathroom of the Silver Lake restaurant where loved ones had gathered to celebrate her birthday, she reached out to three million followers in an Instagram story, iridescent tears streaking mascara down her face. “What I wanted for my birthday was PROGRESS,” she lamented. “I want to know...
