issue nO.5 – The Storyteller Issue.

I want to tell you a story. While we were away, we began an experiment. We asked local writers and storytellers of all kinds to join us for a live reading at a little bar on MacDougal Street in New York City’s West Village. The space itself has its own story. It was once the Gaslight Cafe. Noted...

nonfiction: Zehra Khan

TANGERINE   My mother-in-law called me down from my bedroom to sit with her in the lounge. I was her American daughter-in-law in Pakistan, a match that my aunt had arranged. She reclined on the sofa and cataloged all the women my husband could have married. Aunts who promised their (very young) girls to...

photo essay: Magali Duzant

Ardara and On The photographic series Ardara and On feeds into an American stereotype; the West as a place of possibility and new beginning coupled with a feeling of disillusionment in that idea; a feeling of loss, all placed within a storied and cinematic setting. These images illustrate the ways in...

the Conversation: Willie Perdomo with Jon Sands

I met Willie Perdomo in 2008 when he was teaching at Urban Word’s Preemptive Ed conference. I told him I had just been commissioned for a workshop series at a syringe exchange in Midtown, and he said, “That’s great, bro. What’s your address?” I wrote it down, he said peace, and...

fiction: Toni Todd

Detour   Just outside Amarillo, we were a sorry pair of crispy hippies, tailbones aching, balanced on lumpy backpacks in the emergency lane of the freeway, thumbs outstretched, pointed east.  At that moment, I’d have signed over my trust fund for a sandwich and a cushioned seat on an air conditioned...

nonfiction: Saeed Jones

 We Will Not All Be Saved   I cannot see them from the window of my hotel room, but wildfires are flaring out of control at the edge of Austin. Walking away from what I cannot see and slipping back into bed, I pull the newspaper off of the nightstand. “The Bastrop Wildfire has claimed 800 homes.”...

fiction: Shira Erlichman

Your Worst Best Friend   Shark is smoking cigarette after cigarette in the phone booth we’re sharing. My car broke down way outside of town, and hers too, and here we are. She can’t wait till I’m done, so she comes right in. My lungs are so distracted I can’t remember who I...

photo essay: Alexander Mendelevich

ALEXANDER MENDELEVICH It’s seems that in now reality all of our feelings are being repressed into one superficial facade. In this facade there is only one type of beauty that implies perfection. There is a different existence though, in which all of our immediate needs and desires are being shown,...

fiction: Desiree Dighton

Little Known Fact   Little known fact: Tulum is the yoga capital of Mexico. Alistair told me this, because his is a world of facts, of black and white, but I knew almost nothing when I decided to go there, only what I’d read on VisitMexico.com and once when I clicked on the live web cam,  mile after...

fiction: Amos Jasper Wright

Miscreant Populations and Their Effects on Jim Crow Methodologies of Street Paving in the Industrial South   Picture me now, my name is Jim Crow, as set down in this here report, in a orange yellow safety vest reflective of all lights and baggy blue jeans falling loose up around my waist, rake in hand....

fiction: Megan Falley

THE RUNAWAYS   We live in a nameless town. Our mailbox is red and rusted shut like a mouth that has not been kissed in fifty years. There is no mailman because there is no mail. These names have been borrowed from books we liked best. Beyond our wraparound porch there is nothing but infinite...