Dark Chamber by Jimmy Chen
An illustration in Albrecht Dürer's The Painter's Manual (1525) shows a man attempting to master perspective using a grid through which a reclining model is seen. In the background, two adjacent windows, one functioning as a landscape and the other as a still life, act as grids themselves. For unclear reasons, the model's hand hovers... Read More
A Thousand Lives by Matthew Jakubowski
I wondered about the world between books and people, remembering an old idea I’d read, that we exist first as thoughts, then as words on a page, and only by some ghost of a chance, when someone gets lucky, are we eventually made flesh... Read More
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
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