ISSUE #3

Erasure

We are pleased to feature photos by Fazal Sheikh in this issue. To view more images and read about his collaborative work with writer and photographer Teju Cole, see Madigan Haley’s essay “Writing Nearby Images, Seeing the Black” in our Speculations on the Field section. Above: “Shamso, Zahara, and Alima, Somali refugee camp, Liboi, Kenya, 1994” (from Human Archipelago by Sheikh and Cole).

The editors thank Fazal Sheikh and Teju Cole for permission to share their work.

Table of Contents

Editor’s Comments

Escape to Outer Space: A Pandemic Travel Guide / Michelle Ha

While grading my charcoal study of a pinecone, my college studio art teacher remarked that I seem to draw “half from observation, half from imagination.” I wish I had asked her which half, exactly.

But For Our Words: A Redaction / Cherie Nelson

I am not sure this is what my mother meant, but I rarely give my mother enough credit for the things she knows.

Southern Bells / Elizabeth Thomas

Growing up, when one of us kids would mention some unsavory fact about a family member—their alcoholism or suicide—my grandmother would say, “We don’t talk about that.” So, we didn’t.

Burning Officers / Alice Nelson

We forgive everything of a lover, Ondaatje wrote. We forgive selfishness, desire, guile—as long as we are the motive for it. But can we forgive these things of ourselves?

Obstruction / Melissa Grunow

The house groans around her. She cannot find the strings; there is nothing to pull.

Problems with Enlightenment / Jasmine V. Bailey

I want to tell the story of my crimes: not just the ones I’ve committed, but those I’ve suffered, those I’ve wanted to commit, those I’ve understood. 

Comparative Obliterature: Two Examples / Andrew Sunshine

 If you can write it, you can obliterate it. That is why it is forbidden to write the name of God.

Una donna / Selby Wynn Schwartz

The rights we didn’t have in Italy were the same rights we hadn’t had for centuries, and thus not worth enumerating, but in 1877, a modification to the Pisanelli Code allowed us to act as witnesses.

Invisible mending (a disintegrated essay) / Peta Murray and David Carlin

Old age is often seen as a time of diminishing unfortunately, not symmetrically.  After the verses and the chorus there is only one possible out(fit) for the end. Amen.

to have eaten the octopus / Jessie Kraemer

Notions are fertile. A whisper can sink damply into a soil and grow fruit, while realer seeds are eaten and forgotten. 

revision / Sarah Heady

i am no longer a resident but a consumer of the town and its whiteness, which i can only see from a distance.

Sites of Departure / Jessica Watson

Within the first year of my first nursing job, I learned the post-mortem checklist by rote. I became adept at rolling people into body bags, remembering to zip the bag head to foot so that those that followed, like the mortician, only had to unzip an inch to check the toe tag.

Speculations on the Field

Writing Nearby Images, Seeing the Black / Madigan Haley

The racial category of blackness has not only provided an alibi for white supremacy's denial of any ethical relationships with the human beings that it brutalizes, it has also been the negative against which modern political categories have been posited, such as the citizen.

Why I Am Not a Poet / Erik Anderson

In the many hundreds of poems I wrote between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight, pronouns were abstractions: I was certainly another, and another, and another, but it was never me.

Speculative Book Reviews

Clea / Colin Hamilton

Generations of middle-age men in both fiction and reality have found themselves unnerved by adolescent flowering, and the story of their humiliating, doomed pursuit is one we know well. Wallace inverts this tale.