ISSUE #2

What History Teaches

Environment by Garth Evans. The editors would like to thank Garth for permission to share his work.

Table of Contents

Editor’s Comments

Me: First Grade / Melora Wolff

Our teacher, picturing a life beyond her reach, instructed us only, “Check your posture. Smile. Now count to three.”

Jericho / Valerie Ang

You will speak of how the spotlights strobed. How they kaleidoscoped across the hall, rubying the world to red.

America Was a Shooting Star / Natalia Singer

As we pilot our way through ordinary days, when do we sense the beginning of a time of promise and freedom and renewed flourishing, and when do we feel in our gut the beginning of the end? 

Affliction / Daniel Schonning

In Cairo or Amman, you can hear them call their children Mama. Mama because they speak to absence: Mama as in qelb Mama, mother’s heart; Mama as in hayaa Mama, mother’s life.

Enter Time, The Chorus / Lesley Jenike

I suppose you might see the unsayable as a weakness, the totemic as lifeless. You might think it’s the vibrant motion of a visible narrative that keeps art alive.

Imagine: A Day Without Evening / N.D. Brown

The service, well over a thousand years old, has seen empires fall and world wars come and go. The priest sings to himself with only candles lighting the interior. Now imagine those lights go out.

Let Me Recite What History Teaches / Heidi Stalla and Diana Chester

Contraltos, the lowest female voice part, are rare, falling between tenor and mezzo-soprano; so rare, I read, that some people today deny that contraltos actually exist.

The First Cut / Chip Colwell

Whenever or however the first cut happened, it would come to reshape the ways in which our human ancestors behaved, imagined, and evolved. The first cut—the first tool—changed everything.

Ann; "Death and the Maiden" / David Lazar

Why am I writing about Ann? Why am I thinking about Ann? Guilt is a privilege of the living.

On Breaking Up / Leora Fridman

“You’re the first to really win me over,” I told him, and his smile stretched in the Skype window.

Buying a House: Every Story Is True and Every Story Is A Lie / Sean Prentiss

As Chad the Realtor slows his car onto quiet Lockwood Avenue, he says, This is 626 Lockwood. Tell me what you think.

Speculations on the Field

Shifting Borders: Race, Class, and Speculative Placemaking / Rachel Toliver

How, I wondered, does one neighborhood get imagined as a utopia, while another neighborhood, literally on the other side of a street, get imagined as a dystopia? To figure that out, I had to do some time traveling.

Speculative Book Reviews

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast / Leila Philip

By the time we finish we know we are in a version of Alice’s wonderland where no means yes and yes means no, and size is a matter of timing and perspective.

Of Curses and Beauty: The Memoirs of Mario Praz / Robin Hemley

Perhaps hidden in a secret compartment of a burnished cherrywood desk with ebony accents on the third floor of the Palazzo Primoli, Of Curses and Beauty is kept, admired and reread by the museum’s docents, but otherwise kept under wraps, the true nature of Mario Praz jealously guarded.