La Observadora

by Rodrigo Toscano

Feeling the initial jolts of an explosive, subterranean social transformation is something that she lives for, especially when the jolts are perceived to erupt from nearly frozen bystanders’ warm, pulsating bodies.

First, their emotions brighten to a maximum luminosity, spectacular accidents in thought causing intention to splinter into multiple paths of action; next, their ideals deflate and tuck hard against actual lived conditions; after that, their sense of public vanity dissipates, a scattering plume of smoke to nowhere; finally, their dogged dedication to reason clamps its straining claws into a rapidly unfolding speculative science of a just-around-corner “reality.”

The jolts come in a series of flickering dream images, sending waves of recovered historical memory into her sense of The Now.

She adores this new “little demon” friend more than anything else in the world. The feeling is mutual.

Sustenance and Survival

From the Editor

Fiction:

Gibraltar Apes Save the Bees by Jenny Halper
After Dancing by Peter Hully
Concealment in the Love Space by Adalena Kavanagh

Note from Fiction Editors April Flynn, Frank Huerta, and Jacob Spears
 

Nonfiction:

Peeps!Goat Haunt by Susan Jostrom
Threads by Susan Kieffer
Interview with Anne Fadiman by Tim Maddocks

Note from Nonfiction Editors Tim Maddocks and Laura Clark
 

Poetry:

Will eat for food

Clap, Goddamnit, or the Pixies Get It by Nathan Blake
Bombs Away Dream Baby by Boona Daroom
Vernal Atonally by Boona Daroom
On Perspective by Jay Deshpande
Meal by Katrina Greco
Special Contribution: The Invention of Music by Jean-Paul Pecqueur
Special Contribution: X-ray by Jean-Paul Pecqueur
Birth by Monica Wendel
The Blurry Choice: Hot Metal Bridge Interviews Eileen Myles by April Flynn

Note from Poetry Editors John Calvasina and Lauren Russell

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