ARCHIVE
Uredo Agada
Tashroom Ahsan
Emma Atkins
Sean Bentley
Jack Berglund
Kelly Burgess
Leon Derber
Tessa Dillman
Panika M.C. Dillon
Kyle Dunn
Isabel Fontes
Yoav Ginsburg
Magdi Hazaa
Zainab Umar Ibrahim Ibrahim
David Anson Lee
Lux Nguyen
Tolulope Olasewere
Laura Oliverio
Em Player
Alex Reinsch-Goldstein
Gerard Sarnat
Ana M. Mahomar Simar
Evelyn Sanchez
Betty Stanton
Becca Stickler
Rory Sullivan
Joe Timmerman
Andrea Villa
Emile Young
volume 2.1
Leon Derber - Hoi An, Vietnam
Jack Berglund - a good backpack
Kelly Burgess - map (right), lonesome cowgirl (left)
Laura Oliviero - Ece in California
Lux Nguyen - Kyoto Kids
Maybe all I remember of home, is a Super Eagles-themed birthday party
by Uredo Agada
Star-studded
buildings wink hello on the horizon.
Beckoning me to forget the plane
and everything before.
In the deep-sea dark sky above
I search for the constellation of a cake
decorated with soccer goals and icing grass,
shared between thirteen third-graders in two-toned
blue uniforms. The children fight over
white and green mini plastic jerseys but mom
made sure I got number 10. Now, I blink
at the empty sky and crave vanilla.
I have arrived
and can no longer find Polaris.
Today is the Day
by Kyle Dunn
Dear E,
You know I’m going to ask for money. So let’s skip the usual politics. I wish to hell
I was standing face to face with you right this minute. To ask you like a man. I
wish I wasn’t asking.
We made it to key west. It is not like I thought it would be. It is heavy and tired.
We wanted to drive. Can’t get seasick on wheels. But Chloe and me we’re going
out of our heads since new orleans. We hit our bad luck streak the second we
started making plans. Kelly is dead.
He was not an ‘altogether’ bad sort of guy. Matter of fact we talked one time on the
telephone. When he had us surrounded back in denton county. Anyhow. That’s
what they said. They hooked us up a phone to sort of negotiate our surrender. Sent
in the soda jerk with the ringer on a platter. Look how that turned out. Ha, ha.
Somehow Chloe is still alive. I don’t know how that bootlegger the one what took
us down here he didn’t catch her bleeding from her belly like a stuck pig. His name
is Gordon. You’ll meet him. He got us here right as the stars fade. He said what’s
she doing bundled up this close to the equator. I told him I knocked her up. That
we’re in the family way against our family’s wishes. Cause we love each other.
Like in the movies you like. Dressed her up in a wool coat went all the way down
to the ankles. To keep the baby warm.
Get this. Gordon’s a wrecker. That means he goes fishing for old ships. When he
finds them he gets to keep their treasure. Thirty years he’s at it. Wakes us up every
morning he says Today Is The Day. Everybody says he’s crazy. That’s why he took
us in I expect. On account of our escapades like they call it in the mainland papers.
They get down here late. A month goes by no one knows who won the world
series. I know a guy does King Carl’s shirts. Says he’s back in by game 5. When
the giants win you can have my payout. I got them 10 to 7 against.
You’re the only one we ever liked. We call you our benefactor. I really cared to see
you again. Chloe says she cannot stand sentiment because her family comes from
money. It boguses everything, just like her folks.
She’s out cold or she’d do the writing. She swore me to a pact and her to me too. If
we make it this far and only one of us is still having ideas, put the other out of their
misery. You know how she gets. Every hour more morose. Blames me for the
turning of the earth. It’s not like it was before. All pink and kansas and open road.
I hear Gordon and his crew putting out to sea now. To do a survey on a mangrove
what wrecked a spanish galleon four hundred years ago. Them boys took the
mangrove for la grand baleina. That’s a whale. To shoot and kill and eat it. Strip it
for oil and soft skin to sell. Millions in gold on that ship. But it was night. It
swamped them, the mangroves did. Cracked their hull in splinters. And they all
drowned but the one. They didn’t have flashlights back then.
For now just send the money by wire to the new names I put below. 500 makes
sense to me. Gordon says when they find the ship they’ll stake us a wad of
doubloons. Because we’re good luck charms he says, our coming down when we
did, a pregnant gal under the north star. So we can pay you back the half thou right
away. With interest.
They do things different down here. People trust each other. Depend on one
another. Chip in. Everything is hard to come by. Food, medicine. Medicine mainly.
Comes a hurricane and you count your lucky stars should you see the other side of
it. They take their licks together. Take one to the belly and we all bleed. You put a
lame dog down, it was in the book. Hell, half the time mother nature decides it all
for you. Takes it halfway and you take it the other half. It’s right because it’s
natural and it’s natural because it’s good. You look it in the face. No one gets bent
out of shape.
I do believe my luck is turning. Before I commenced to write I prayed for the first
time since way back in OK. And Evan I swear this minute it has commenced to
snow. The whole town of wreckers and whores and cigar money is standing on its
feet in half a foot of snow with their tongues out catching flakes that taste like
saltwater. Licking the air like a lollipop. There’s no place like here right now. You
lay down to make yourself an angel and even the frost goes to warm you.
When you get this just make the wire out to Gordon. I’m going to catch the first
boat out of town. It will be easier when it’s just me. I think I’ll learn Spanish.
Yours,
K
Joe Timmerman - Rest! cries the chief sawyer
Pacific Crossings,
Written in Steam
by David Anson Lee
They stepped off ship with pockets full of knots:
salt stiff on collars, names folded into breath.
Angel Island was ledger, not harbor:
one long room for waiting and the slow measure of men.
They leaned like thin flags on wooden benches,
hands still smelling of the fish market: soy and sea.
Language slid away: officers with clipped atlas mouths,
an alphabet that scraped at tongues.
Some learned to laugh at menus, pointing;
some kept the old speech like prayer beneath the ribs.
They bartered in what survived: recipes rattled like marbles,
bright instructions for steaming a dumpling steady enough
to anchor a life.
At night Mei wrapped her child in coat:
a child who’d never fingered a schoolbook.
They watched the bay burn with reflected rails of light,
while the Pacific kept its slow, indifferent count.
A man folded a letter into an oar:
hope paddling paper toward a dock called WORK.
They learned the city by tastes it offered:
sweet buns at dawn, bitter tea for long waits.
Later, in narrow rooms with different windows,
they cooked memory into air: ginger, scallion, the chorus
of water lifting into steam. It was not homeland returned,
nor only the town left behind;
but a joining, a recipe retooled into a name,
a sound softened until it could live on the tongue.
Tashroom Ahsan - Ancestral Voyeurism
Children of immigrants grow up with fantasies. My parents have constructed an image of Bangladesh that corresponds to nothing real. A core aspect of each of our identities no longer exists in the world. To get a sense of the rapid transformation of the country, I farmed in a village that harbors all of modernity’s tensions—I also sought out my old extended family, those who remain in Bangladesh after half a century or more. The village, having just obtained a paved road, harbors factories that have begun swallowing up the swaths of forests and farmland beside mud huts. These images record some of the impressions I had during
that time.
meditations in exile
by Tolulope Olasewere
i lead myself steadily into the darkness and the light there is no other option in the office of
this american dream i occupy only the parts of myself closest to the bisection wound i tailor
my voice so much that i forget the melody of my own name and have to teach it to myself again
and again i try to remember everything as i scrub the blood from the flag prepare for
independence day convince myself that it is different from what it was the month before the
night before the gunshots echo i grab a can of hope from the store twice as much in this
currency even on sale the can is empty i close my eyes to swallow the tears there is one drop
left so i save it for tomorrow in the company of friends i shun my smile as it begins to form
search the hashtag before the morning comes this country you are your own ending and
rebirth your own traitor and homeland your own unbecoming and becoming you are all the
people you have killed you are all the people that remain sometimes you are not your own
and you are
listen i have loved you beyond the borders of my being i have drunk gallons of your most
torrent seas you mistook me for ash anointed me set me aflame we are a universe apart and
still everyday i wake up with my name buried beneath my tongue i lick taste the ground and
tell myself i am reborn
listen today i will live despite the bitterness i will live rocks on my tongue i will live
i think of home
by Tolulope Olasewere
while washing the dishes
& the kitchen becomes a river
Rory Sullivan - untitled
The Colour of Lisbon
by Isabel Fontes
Lisbon, Present day
The first time João heard the tiles speak, he was elbow-deep in mildew, trying to pry an old azulejo from the kitchen wall of his dead uncle’s apartment.
It whispered, not in Portuguese, but in a thick, granular moan like earth turning over itself in sleep. His fingers recoiled as if burned.
He thought: Mould hallucination.
He said aloud to no one, “Must be the bleach.”
Then the tile laughed.
Lisbon doesn’t explain itself. It leans, it resists renovation, and it flirts with collapse.
João, thirty-five, recently divorced, childless, unemployed, and with a master's in geological acoustics (useless unless you work for volcanoes), had returned to take care of his uncle’s affairs. Uncle Vítor had been a beloved crank: a retired tram conductor who claimed the city was a living organism that only tolerated humans like mild eczema.
“You can’t own Lisbon,” Vítor once said, “you just rent her breath.”
João was scraping her breath off mouldy plaster, alone, in a kitchen where the stove bled rust, and the window opened into someone else’s shower.
The azulejos kept talking.
Not all of them—just a few, usually in the same corner. They vibrated slightly at night, like insects in a dream.
He recorded them.
Analysed them.
The sound wasn’t in any human language. However, the rhythm bore a resemblance to old fado sheet music. Slowed down, it sounded like footsteps on old stone, water boiling, and something like weeping.
It was ridiculous. And also, real.
So, he did what any sad, broke, lonely Portuguese man would do.
He told his mother.
She arrived with cheese, crucifixes, and her cousin Dália—who claimed to have survived a haunted bidet in Évora.
“This building,” Dália said, pacing the apartment with salt in her pockets, “has roots. There is below here.”
João rolled his eyes. His mother crossed herself and sniffed the tile.
That night, the floor cracked.
Not visibly, but with a sound. Like the apartment adjusting its bones, a long, low creak filled the room, and the smell of iron and seawater filled the room.
The next morning, they found a hole behind the pantry—a neat circle of stone—older than the rest of the building. And air—cool, dry, ancient—poured out like breath.
They should have called the authorities.
Instead, they called Tó Zé.
Tó Zé was João’s cousin. A former parkour YouTuber turned part-time urban spelunker. He wore fingerless gloves and believed every important secret in Europe was buried under a metro station.
“This,” he said, peering into the hole, “is not on any map. This is older than the city.”
João stared at the hole, then at his family. “What do we do?”
“You go in,” said his mother.
“Me? Why me?”
“You’re the geologist. And you’ve got nothing better to do.”
Which was true.
So João packed a headlamp, two flares, a camera, and a ham sandwich and descended into the underbelly of Lisbon.
What he found wasn’t a tunnel.
It was a room.
Carved from stone, perfectly spherical, covered in blue and green tile—the same azulejos from the kitchen. Except these whispered louder.
A non-load-bearing column stood in the centre, with a basin at its base. The basin was full of water. The water reflected not João’s face but the night sky.
The wrong sky.
He reached out and touched it.
The water felt like silk, then like teeth, then like memory.
And then he remembered everything.
His daughter.
Not biological. But once, during his first marriage, they’d taken care of a girl for three weeks—a refugee whose parents had disappeared crossing the Mediterranean.
Her name was Mouna. She was six. She always sang mostly old French songs and called João “uncle” with enormous trust. João had wept in the shower for three days straight when she left, back into the bureaucratic maze.
He hadn’t thought of her in years.
Now she filled him.
Not her image but her weight. Her laughter. Her breath was against his chest during a thunderstorm.
The basin had given him that.
Or returned it.
He staggered out of the room, into the tunnel, into the world—heaving.
The next week, João brought his mother down.
Then Dália.
Then Tó Zé.
Each had their own memory returned. Each different. Each overwhelming.
They kept it a secret. The hole. The basin. The sky-water.
Because how do you explain that under the city, there’s a pool of memory that remembers for you?
They called it the Colour Beneath.
Things began to shift.
João smiled again. Ate better. Cleaned his uncle’s apartment. He took long walks along the Tejo. He started drawing.
Tó Zé started a podcast. (Of course.)
Dália stopped ghost-hunting and started teaching yoga.
But then… word got out.
First, it was João’s ex-wife.
Then, some architecture students.
Then, a startup guy named Filipe with a Bluetooth earpiece and a plan to “monetize transcendental nostalgia.”
They wanted access.
They offered money.
João said no.
The city said no louder.
The tiles cracked.
The floor trembled.
Filipe fell into a mild coma after touching the basin. When he woke up, he wept and became a Jesuit.
The story hit Twitter. Then CNN Portugal.
The government sent scientists. The Church sent quiet men in darker clothes.
João tried to reason with them.
But then the ground did something new.
It rose.
One afternoon, a plaza in Chiado folded itself upward, revealing another basin beneath an abandoned bakery. This time, it didn’t show memory.
It showed guilt.
And a crowd of tourists saw their worst acts reflected in pastry glaze.
Screaming ensued. A man threw himself into the river.
Lisbon was waking up.
Not metaphor.
Fact.
Something under the city—the real city, older than the Romans, older than time—was responding.
To what?
João believed it was attention.
Lisbon had grown tired of being photographed, commodified, and walked on.
Now, it was listening back.
He was arrested after giving a radio interview where he said:
“The city has rights. It deserves consent.”
This statement outraged officials.
It inspired thousands.
Lisbon youth staged a protest at Praça do Comércio by standing perfectly still and whispering to the stones.
Old women came and lit candles to forgotten fountains.
The government built a wall around the basin in João’s apartment.
It lasted twelve hours.
Then the tiles there cracked wide open, spilling old songs into the street.
João fled.
He lives now under the aqueduct, in a dry section known only to pigeons and teenagers with complicated hobbies.
He teaches small groups how to listen to tile.
How to breathe memory without breaking.
How to ask permission from a city with a soul.
He is not a cult leader.
He is not a prophet.
He cherishes the lessons of the past and believes that love flourishes when guided by boundaries.
volume 1.2
Alina Amin
Dustin Chambers
Nancy Cherry
William Derge
John Francis
Ann Marie Gamble
Yoav Ginsburg
Andy Go
Carole Greenfield
Roman Jones
Rosa Kang
M. Jeanette Kellcher
Madison King
Sydney Krantz
Evan Krebs
Peter Leroe - Munoz
Michael Marquand
Glenis Moore
Karama Neal
Marlon Paine
Leonarda Rodriguez-Anaya
April Shackman
Dave Shafer
Dave Shafer - Drive Thru
In Russian
by Ann Marie Gamble
There is a word halfway
between “crowd” and “mob”
she tells me
We try out some options
“gang,” “rabble,” “pack”
I pull up Google Translate but we can't
get the keyboard to type in Cyrillic
so we dredge more words out of our heads
No, it's pejorative, she says, they're stupid people
and the thesaurus slams shut and we're back to politics
Leo Rodriguez-Anaya - Pigeon Sabrett
Dreams of Angara
Story and photo by
Marlon Paine
“She cannot be satisfied. She will not let him alone. She removes her clothes and calls to him. Once that night and twice the next morning he complies and in the faint darkness between lies awake, the lights of Dijon faint on the ceiling, the boulevards still.”
— A Sport and a Pastime, James Salter
I buy a copy from the bookseller on the corner of 14th and Union Square West. It's a few days before I fly to Russia. A Sport and a Pastime, a book I've heard about for years. It gets mentioned in certain circles. I read it on the plane. A young French girl in the countryside, her Ivy-League lover. He’s dropped out twice now. It's about him, really, their youth, its freedoms, life when these things are gone. He wants the sort of life you have to create for yourself, the sort of life that can kill you if you take it too far.
It’s not a very long novel. I read it several times. There is sex on almost every page. There are no stores that sell English books in Irkutsk.
+
An instructor invites me to his English class. Most of his students have never met an American. That’s how we meet. Yana is about to leave but she changes her mind. We drive around the city that night with her instructor in the back. He is correcting us, her English and my Russian. We leave him at the cafe next time.
Walking around Ostrov Yunost, Youth Island, in the middle of the Angara, the river that splits the city. It's the only river to flow out of Lake Baikal — over three hundred rivers fill it — and continues a thousand miles northeast, where it connects with the Yenisei. Further north it drains into the Arctic. I kiss Yana by the water. She gets up to leave. “Why did you do that?” She asks.
+
Ten weeks in Irkutsk, the largest city in southeast Siberia, about million people live there. Yana and I go to Ulan-Ude together. It’s a seven hour sleeper train around the southern edge of the lake. We play cards to pass the time. She keeps winning. I don’t understand the rules. She tries to explain again. “Ponimayesh?” she asks — Do you understand? — “Nyet,” I say.
Almost every Russian I meet has read Jack London. Some tell me he is their favorite American author. I have never read Jack London. I don't think I've ever talked about Jack London. Yana reads Martin Eden to me from across the compartment. She stops every few sentences to look up a word in the back of the book.
+
It’s still light as we pass Baikal. People from every compartment have come into the corridor to watch. Women hold their young children up to the windows. Baikal is the largest freshwater lake in the world, 22%. Some say it is the birthplace of shamanism. Others, that aliens live at the bottom. It is the world’s deepest lake, and presumably its oldest. Loch Ness-type sea dragons, boats that are never seen again; the winds can change in an instant.
“Irkutsk? Why did you go to Irkutsk?” Every Russian outside of Irkutsk asks this, several times a night in Moscow. To them, it is like saying you traveled across to America to live in the capital of West Virginia.
+
Yana is always making other Russians laugh but she doesn't know how to translate her jokes. She shrugs. We are walking around Ulan-Ude. There are cars everywhere but the city feels empty. A young Russian couple fights in the distance. The woman is swinging her fists, she hits him in the head with her bag. He stands there, covering himself, taking a few good ones. “It is Russian relationship,” Yana says.
The city is full of stray dogs. They terrify me. The rabid ones will chase you for miles. Yana stops to pet them. She pulls a snack out of her purse. “Ety sobaky tak mila,” she says — these dogs are so cute. We eat at yurt along the bank of the river. Ulan-Ude is Buryat territory, a Mongolic people, the most populous indigenous group in Siberia. The central square in the city has the largest Lenin head in the world. It's over twenty five feet tall.
+
We can only stay the weekend. I study Russian four days a week. Yana is an interior designer. She has projects to return to. She still lives with her ex-boyfriend. “Ohn heroshy chelovyek,” she tells me. He is a good guy. She turns away when I take photos of her, covers her face with her hands. We are on the train back. The lights from each station come in through the windows as we pass, the smell of gasoline. It would be nice to keep going, four days to Moscow, or three to Vladivostok in the other direction. Yana reaches for my hand from across the compartment. It is her way of saying goodnight. She is still deciding on things. She knows I'm leaving soon.
We make tea in the morning from the samovar in the corridor. The water comes out slightly greenish. We are rolling along the banks of the lake again, heading west. From north to south, Baikal is 400 miles long, longer than the drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Most have only seen a part of it. Yana had never seen Ulan-Ude. No one I speak to has been to Severobaikalsk, the northern tip. I've heard there are hot springs there.
+
You can drink straight from the lake in certain areas. There are thousands of plants and animals endemic to the region. The Baikal seals, nerpa, swim in circles at the Limnological Institute in Listvyanka, the closest town on the lake to Irkutsk — it's only an hour's drive, where Baikal drains into the Angara. The water here is polluted from runoff and overdevelopment. A man makes tea on the beach. He serves it in plastic cups that soften from the heat. It was sunny when we arrived, but now it’s overcast and windy. We skip rocks. Waves lap against the stone seawall. They dammed the Angara in several places. Electricity is practically free because of it, but it flooded localities around the lake; entire villages disappeared forever.
