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  • Fragments from Gnome by Robert Lunday

    When you drive, the landscapes slide sharply through the sides of your face. They fill your cheeks, your temples, they build behind the eyes and ears. Soon they’re ripped by the wind or a gawker’s stare from the back of your head, and you’re again in the landscape... Read More

    Blood Poppies by Barbara Harroun

    It was 1949. The war still coursed through the veins of the men who made it back, the parents who tended farms their sons would never inherit, the wives who bedded different men than the ones they kissed good-bye... Read More

    Your Famous Sister Walking Through a Plate-Glass Door at the Gehry Museum If It Existed by Forrest Roth

    I distrust people, everyone in this city, those who speak in the anecdotal. Yes I know you did something. We all did. And we all know each other. We know your famous sister, and you and her were, like, aberrant: seeming to cause willful self-injury and thus a seething insult... Read More

    Saints by Laura Ellen Joyce

    The first time you watch this reel, do it with a blindfold. Slowly lift the silk from your eyes and let the sharpness come into focus. Unless you want an iron shock—in that case pin open your eyes and let it flood you. There are one hundred precious metals in this reel. They have been... Read More

    Hot Mess: Breaking the Skin by Rebecca Norton

    When observing a figure depicted in a painting, we usually take a few moments to notice how the skin is painted. This informs us of the genre of the painting, the artist’s style, the ideas about the figure, etc... Read More

    Hellhole by Tristan Foster

    On a night when the moon is low and yellow as egg yolk, I watch a plane, silhouetted but for a few blinking lights, flying quiet as a bat over the roof of my home. Inside, upstairs, I use a pencil and an old city map that’s dog-eared at the corners to plot the possible... Read More

    Three Fragments from Songs About Women by James Brubaker

    Look to the Lowlands and the women there. Banished, all of them, to this neighborhood, this catastrophe of design, this frozen lake of whispers and half-finished thoughts, hidden from view. As you arrive in the Lowlands, don’t ask when or why the place was built. Don’t ask why the houses share no unifying architectural principle... Read More

    I Am Not Supposed to Be Here: Birth and Mystical Detection by Nicola Masciandaro

    True detection lies in being extra circumspect about birth, life’s originary and seemingly unerasable crime. “If attachment is an evil,” says Cioran, “we must look for its cause in the scandal of birth... Read More

    Hulk Hogan Comes to Tuscaloosa by Brian Oliu

    And it’s really him; at least that’s what the children say, that the sky turned red and yellow before it grew black: white thunderbolts across the sky like an interruption, a whistle on the wind that doesn’t know any better... Read More

    Art, Money, Beauty, Shit, Representation, the Communal by Sam Kriss

    In Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, Martin Heidegger attempts to account for and justify the phenomenon of modern art. While maintaining his own somewhat conservative tastes, he claims that modern art possesses autonomous value... Read More