art by Alessandro Avondo

by Gabriela Halas

*Content warning: mentions of unwanted sexual attention and aggression

Dear perfect stranger,

It’s you again! We’ve met before. Though, your face, admittedly, has blurred with the rest. But I know it’s you. You’re the captain on that ship you keep sailing around my breasts, my face, my car, the bar, the beach, the street. You’re posh and shiny, or middle-class, someone’s dad, and once, no— a few times, you were just some young dude leering too close.

art by Thomas Vogt

by Laurie Blauner

I wanted instruction in something different. So I took a course called “The Photography of Confession” along with Tai Chi and clogging classes. The teacher, Bill, showed us Diane Arbus, Irving Penn, Yousuf Karsh, and Cindy Sherman photographs. He told us why they were good. Which made me think about how we were all pinioned in our own times, with their particular concerns such as identity, perception, and human or animal nature. Everyone knew how to click a photograph. It was always an individual’s point of view,

art by loulia Lymperopoulou.

by Lorena Sellin 

As I was walking back to my overpriced but charming hotel– how Parisian, right?- the air was thick with a subtle undertone of late summer blossoming’s, mingling with muffled sounds of gastronomes closing for the night; bins rattling, and stray cats prowling. The polluted city air had given way to the softness of this summer night, and amidst it all, there was a hint of something I immediately recognized- “Thousand Kisses from Paris “, the latest perfume everyone was talking about. What a stupid name for a perfume.

art by Jacelyn Yap

by Kim Chinquee

You’ve Reached Your Destination

We’re on trains and buses, testifying against criminals, then on a late-night plane to somewhere else. Something in my gut doesn’t sit right, and I have a pain beneath my kneecap. I realize, as I write, this is no help to my reader. How can one escape a world that exists beyond the limits of one’s body? What happens after you must sleep and fall into another land? It’s not all dandelions and sunshine,

art by Zizanie

by Maria Kassandrou

I click my mouse from time to time.

Not because I always do something. Sometimes I click randomly on the screen, in order to give sonic signs of life; somewhere without consequence—without buttons or links. I stare at the open pdf file, postponing into eternity the reading of that document.

We’re both extremely quiet, each immersed in our own world. If we didn’t click the mouse buttons occasionally, the whole day would just pass over us. As if we were asleep,

by bart plantenga

Apophenia is the tendency to misperceive connections & meanings between unrelated things; a disorder exacerbated by our times, by social media, by our perceived lack of agency, & by our devastating conviction that over-consumption comes with no environmental consequences.

I came across artist Alisha Sullivan’s work. Her “In Place of a Better Version of Ourselves” consists of photos of mysterious megaliths placed in a residential setting. She describes them as “inflatable voids” with the dimensions of an average human being … I found them ominous, ghostly, intrusive & I wanted to give a voice to the hapless &