FICTION
HYBRID
It’s one of those days where it takes breathing before the words sputter out of your mouth. But once they start, you realize how long it’s been since you let your tongue trill into those sonorous rs, let your jaw and tongue work together to sling the throaty gl of your mother tongue.
clearly, we were sat down bitterly.
Visual art
Esrinue
The Paintress of Scents
“I just find it interesting how smell is so overlooked, even though it can trigger very deep emotions and memories. And it also shapes us. We just don’t focus on it, because it’s ephemeral: It is there one moment and disappears in the next, and we can’t get a hold of it.”
Poetry
everyone I love sits around a poker table, emerald
and haunted like Van Gogh’s Night Café —
all the things torn open,
growing green with mold, bite marks.
She tells me what I already guessed.
It’s in the way we can’t make eye contact.
Time is on the T axis, the woman said.
Plotting a new position is like pole dancing.
Sample the catfish.
Use your mouth.
i have never lived in a castle
my body a cul-de-sac
The mouth of the shears squeaks closed.
The mouth of the shears squeaks open.
How much there is to do.
How much there is to do wrong.
Each morning I woke in a dry riverbed.
By November my walk shriveled
from this day forward,
for better for worse
and moonworms crawl from my
mouth. You say my laugh is itchy
