Art by Kate Shaw     It is the Fiat Tagliero building  in Asmara, Eritrea, planned by Giuseppe Pettazzi, fascist aesthete, and built under his watch in thirty-eight.   On either side the central concrete spire,   are fifteen-metre cantilevered wings, the premature arrival of a future long expired, and stationed in Asmara,   Eritrea. Some bureaucrat insists this soaring flight must rest, during construction, on state-approved supports. Pettazzi asks, Have you no faith? Have these removed, or I                will build out here Asmara’s own Golgotha,                 … Continue reading “The Most Beautiful Petrol Station in the World” by Oscar Mardell

Art by Kate Shaw   Late one August evening in a small provincial town, a woman steps out her front door. In her hand, she holds a slim leather briefcase, probably containing a laptop. When she steps down from the small landing in front of the door, a mild breeze fills the air, gently tousling her long blond tresses. She tries to pull her hair back behind her ears without any luck. From the back pocket of her jeans she pulls out a bandeau and ties those unruly locks into a simple ponytail. Now, with no hair interrupting her vision, … Continue reading “Is this the right way?” by Finn Janning

Art by Kate Shaw   May 16, 2019. Gone to Rita, saintly brick.   At wit’s end thumbed thru the mall my viscera become tightrope-walking rhombuses. My weariness goes headfirst. I’m divested of all sibilants, clubfooted, the mall seamy and windswept, familiar in a wet casket kinda way. The rain could have been my dying breath.                      I see sex simulators in disrepair, emoticon affection vended to paper cutouts of dads—tarry treacly castles in their creases.                   I smell hair heat-rolled, crabs wedged into … Continue reading “Dream I Had About Never” by Tomasz W. Wiszniewski

Art by Kate Shaw   0   in search of clarity , a definitive all caps nope is preferable  to the conceptual form of you who sleeps with people posthumously.    the you that goes to bed as a one & then wakes up more as a zero .  that you , but in reverse .  more absence than presence .             in your dreams you’re you ,  but the B side written in code .     1   encoded in a forest there’s an embedded lake . sometimes  you bring me to the edge & then walk away . … Continue reading “zero/one/light/lake/trees  (we’ve been dreaming this for five hundred years)” by Razielle Aigen

Art by Kate Shaw Okay, so now I’m pissed, because I spent an entire morning wandering around the neighborhood, looking up at the skies and waiting for mana to fall and agonizing over how to reduce my thesis into something basic and easily translatable and applicable, and I pass some fucker on the sidewalk wearing a t-shirt that reads “hungry and overthinking it”, with a little picture of a cartoon cat thrown on as well to really hammer the point home.  Because that’s the trouble with living in an algorithmic world, isn’t it, because we can spend entire lifetimes trying … Continue reading “Today’s Revolution Brought to You by the Letter ‘B’” by v.f. thompson

  *This excerpt is featured in Gerassimenko’s chapbook at the water’s edge (Rhythm & Bones Press, 2019) Nadia Gerassimenko is the founding editor of Moonchild Magazine and proofreader at Red Raven Book Design. She is a freelancer in editorial services by trade, a poet and writer by choice, a moonchild and nightdreamer by spirit. Nadia self-published her first chapbook Moonchild Dreams (2015). at the water’s edge (Rhythm & Bones Press, 2019) is her second chapbook. She tweets @moonmoonmother. Continue reading “above below” by Nadia Gerassimenko

“This is how space begins,” writes Georges Perec “with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text.”   ***   I will begin with the act of pointing.    Lack masquerades itself as desire and desire takes the shape of a space. It pulses as the auto-focus on the camera hunts for the edge, or any point that settles it onto the horizon. She appears in the frame as a mere voice at … Continue reading “Excavating A Point of Entanglement” by Sahar Khraibani

Myths tell of the hanged man as a fetus floating head-down, Suspended in some liminal fluid That fills the seamless space between the past and the future.    We are becoming more ourselves with every breath. I hear my heart mutter its name in my chest And then pause, listening for yours.    I do not have a promise for you or a ring to give you.  I cannot even gather words up in a sheaf to leave in a vase on your table. But I can place each of my hands in each of yours.  I can wait for … Continue reading “Thresholding” by Kat Bartlow

It is no wonder That cockroaches Fly, party, and thrive At night They feast on its darkness They sway on its shadows They flap their wings in glory At night For the night Is truly accepting Inviting, tempting, full of desires The night welcomes them In disco lights, in bars, in clubs In the narrow streets, in the corners No judgment, only acceptance In this beautiful, fabulous, avant-garde night For in the night Cockroaches can be butterflies And no one can smack their beautiful drags and make-ups With the slippers of the day, of that piercing ray Of reality, of … Continue reading “Cockroaches of the Liberating Night” by Jack Lorenz A. Rivera