Dear Readers,
If you’re exhausted as I am by artificial intelligence discourse, then I have good news for you: you won’t find a whiff of it here. Not even a rejoinder (we saved that for our homepage). Instead, we’re overflowing with sticky, gooey, porous bodies. Exploding cell walls and furries with fangs. Issue 14 runneth over with these.
This issue also marks the first time we’re publishing a play: Deep Veins by playwright Nelle Tankus. It’s a new form for us, one that at first might seem an odd choice to feature in a scrolling online format. But Nelle’s surreal approach to scenes of queers navigating the high drama of pig lung and Plazmacore, a plasma donation center, was just too good to pass up. Something about the way her characters pause and pay attention to other scenes happening on stage, rewind and try the scene out a different way, feels like a rehearsal for how we try to live now. Failure, sickness, death, all are still deserving of our attention, no matter how painful; all are happening just off stage to others much as they happen to us.
And how do we hold all this simultaneous action in the day-to-day? If the work in Issue 14 is any clue, we stay nimble and move between drastically different scales. Mastodon to centipede. Plankton to spaceship. And we scavenge, like Forest Murmurs in “Dear Sister Split”: “Our grief collapses inside a paper cup. The traces of our bodies broadly fail to make a case within the empire.” And we pay attention to the scum: Bella Massie’s new “SCUM Manifesto,” the forgotten backyard creek, even the urban puddles all around us that provide Genspace x smoke and mold Artist-in-Residence Becca Rodriguez with their bewitching subject of study and the art for this issue’s cover. The scientists are encroaching, but like in Aster Olsen’s “Experiments in Restoration Failure,” they’re increasingly exploring the seams of life left ignored by big & rich institutions.
Scale up or down; scavenge for parts; swim in the scum. As always, thank you for reading, and thank you for staying alert.
In solidarity,
Cal Angus, Publisher