Category: Issue 32

Sky: fucked, because open. occupied, recognized as an extremist organization, acting as a foreign agent, banned on the territory of the Russian Federation. bringing discredit to actions with words. what can you do about the sky with words? don’t look up, don’t cross its borders, don’t read paul celan under its vaults. the pre-dawn sky…

 Once I was followed by a cow. At that time I was stationed with a division. In early morning, quiet, shtum, making my way to the forward site, I heard: someone coming up behind me and wheezing like a sick man: I turned around — it was a cow; dappled, two horns; no distinguishing features…

In this dark night, someone stands at my window, stares into my room. Who is it? Not a word, only heart-piercing eyes, someone is there to protect me. Who is it? The night’s pitch-darkness wakens all things. My secrets, unable to hide, flash in the blue phosphorescent light. The many nights, when I sweat from…

* a wave of uneasiness twists the room’s cube unwinds in a chain of noise walls’ origami contracts into hummocks like hedgehogs contradictions of altitude the outcrop presses man into the clouds of trees   Translated by Ryan Hardy, Kevin M. F. Platt, Timmy Straw   protocol peonies * dew’s perspective the lens observes a…

This is from a set of linked stories.  The stories alternate between the narrator as a child in a small town in Hungary attending a private Roman Catholic school, and when she is living in Milan and working as a cashier in the famous cathedral.  I was heading to get the change from the guard’s…

Deus Ex Machina The cliff signals like a lonely mouth. No one remembers to build a machine that will save us. How heavy it is to carry each feather and bone toward this cliff. Each owl a flame, too hot to draw into the body, so much of it escapes. Chaos ensues like a talon-less…

  My hands were very busy then, pulling and cutting. Keeping the tanks full of freshwater, carrying the specimens each morning out to the experimental site. Tugging my sleeves against black flies. At the end of every pheromone trial we collected the fish back from the stream, writhing in buckets full of mouths. I learned…

Ozone Cafe Is where I’ll wait for you & the local Spiderman. I’ll smoke double apple hookah and I won’t eat the eclair I want to eat. It’s been zero years since the war zone. I’ve lost a day to this chair. Have I waited enough? If not— I’ll hold on longer. Will you check…

  which I cannot write, though I do want to. It does feel good to break. It does feel better to be broken, for one’s outsides to match their insides, the urge to hurt oneself never truly going away, instead metabolizing into the body, subsumed into instinct. Inside me, a taut worry presses from beneath…

  lately, i can’t tell if i’m talking to god or to myself. if there’s really any functional difference. the fish came along & swallowed me down its heaving, fleshy gullet—a word that sounds like it should be loaded into the metal throat of a gun—to the briny cathedral of the stomach where i begged…

  unearth paper husk of bittersweet, a berry all too bright to summon a child. crisp of snow crust edge before foot weight sinks beneath, into soft. stone wall formed by calloused hands over two centuries ago, that lift and ache. sweat long worn into secret pockets of rock. here, you dig. your head low…